Trafalgar: First Series · Volume I

The first volume of the Episodios Nacionales — the great historical novel cycle of Spain

October 1805. Off the coast of Cádiz, the combined fleets of Spain and France sail out to meet the British under Nelson. By nightfall, the Spanish navy will have ceased to exist as a fighting force, and an empire that has ruled the seas for three centuries will have lost them forever.

Gabriel Araceli is fourteen years old. An orphan from the slums of Cádiz, he has been taken into the household of Don Alonso Gutiérrez de Cisniega, a retired naval officer who cannot bear to miss the coming battle. When Don Alonso slips away from his furious wife to join the fleet, Gabriel goes with him, and eventually finds himself aboard the Santísima Trinidad, the largest warship in the world, on the morning of the most catastrophic day in Spanish naval history.

What follows is one of the great battle sequences in European literature: the four-decker as living giant, the sand spread on the planks for the blood, the smoke that swallows the line, the slow agony of a ship that will not surrender and cannot be saved. Pérez Galdós, writing seventy years after the event with the aid of the testimony from the survivors of the battle, gives us a view of Trafalgar from the losing side, not as a British triumph but as a Spanish tragedy, narrated by an old man who was a boy in the rigging and has carried the day with him for the rest of his life.

Trafalgar is the first of forty-six novels in the Episodios Nacionales, Pérez Galdós's vast fictional history of nineteenth-century Spain, a literary project on the scale of Balzac's Comédie humaine, and one of the supreme achievements of European realism. Published in 1873, it has remained continuously in print in Spanish for over 150 years. Trafalgar is for fans of Patrick O'Brian, C.S. Forester, and Bernard Cornwell who are interested in seeing war in the age of sail from the other side of the line, and for those who love Tolstoy, Stendhal, and Hugo to encounter one of Spain's greatest novelists for the first time.

About the author. Benito Pérez Galdós (1843–1920) is widely regarded as the greatest Spanish novelist since Cervantes. Over four decades, he produced the Episodios Nacionales, one of the most incredible accomplishments of world literature ever written. He was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature five times.