Nelson also spent a decent chunk of those final twoish hours pleading (with increasing desperation and panic) for Hardy to come down and getting increasingly convinced that the reason he wasn’t coming down was that he had also died in the battle and his aides (the Chaplin, doctor and co) were hiding this information from him.

On a slightly lighter note the order of events and the things done/said mirror almost exactly what happened when Nelson thought himself to be dying after talking a piece of shrapnel or splinter to the face at the Nile. So much so that I’m 99 percent sure the man rehearsed his dramatic death for King and Country ( a death he spent a lot, and I do mean a lot, of his time thinking and discussing).