Who Was William Hennah?

For those of you less immersed in the Napoleonic Wars than me, William Hennah (at the time a Lieutenant, not Captain) is best known (and thus is known to me) by his involvement in the Battle of Trafalgar on October 21st, 1805. He was the First Lieutenant of HMS Mars under Captain George Duff, a 74-gun third-rate ship of the line serving under Vice-Admiral Collingwood’s Squadron. The Mars took heavy fire in the battle and sustained serious damage, including the loss of 29 souls, and 69 wounded. Among the dead lay her captain, his head taken clean off his shoulders by a cannonball not long after battle was joined, and upon whose loss command fell to William Hennah. George Duff’s body was paraded around the decks to the sound of cheering in what seems to modern sensibilities perhaps a little peculiar, but the men’s morale was not broken by the death of their beloved captain, and this was their display of it to the enemy. His body was draped in British colours shortly after, and the battle commenced in full.

Hennah commanded ably, directing the crew of Mars to fire, despite herself being almost crippled, into the Fougueux. His ability at Trafalgar earned his men’s gratitude and respect and compelled them to a rare display, even of the time, in gracing him with a Letter of Commendation from the ship’s company. He was the recipient of Thanks from Parliament on his return to England too, and promoted Captain for his service.

I first discovered Hennah from a beautiful letter penned to Captain Duff’s wife, which I would like to reproduce here in full. I think it so noble, yet clearly so pained, as he tries to navigate the most difficult task of explaining to a wife the death of her dear husband. It is this impression of Hennah that makes me feel so fond of him. His brave and able command, balanced by his tenderness here, portrays a complex and good man. It struck me from the first moment I read it.

Norwich was George Duff’s (and Sophia Duff’s) son, whom the Captain had ordered off the quarterdeck to keep him safe, writing that he was warmed by the thought of seeing his family again after the battle was over. Alas, he never did.

Hennah never served at sea again. It’s not known to me why – whether the horrors of Trafalgar were enough for one life, or whether he simply had another vision for his future. He retired back to Cornwall, where he lived a life like he had previously, somewhat under the sights of historical record. Not much is known to me aside from his interest in local affairs. He lived as a country gentleman until his peaceful death in Tregony, on the 31st of December 1832, aged 69. His death was marked in a local paper thus: “On the 22inst at Tregony, Cornwall, Captain William Hennah CB one of the old school of British sailors, having entered the navy under Wallis, the circumnavigator and finished his active career in the wake of Collingwood at Trafalgar.”

Standing at the Feet of the Dead:

Written to my Diary on the 28th of September, about events on the 27th of September, 2025. Mild edits have been made for flow and readability but as far as possible I have preserved what I wrote.

St. Cuby’s church is a small one. It was actually quite missable the way we came into the place, partly giving it a very local, cosy, and intimate feeling, but on the other hand it seemed an unremarkable place too that betrayed the prestige and heroism of the man who was buried there.

It took us a while to find his grave – originally, I looked for something ornate. He was, after all, a veteran of Trafalgar – served under Nelson and Collingwood. But no such grave existed. I walked about, at first, frantically scanning the worn and faded headstones of the local dead – many of whom were called William and each of which gave me false alarm. I had no success and eventually Googled his grave to see if there was a picture, and after a bit more searching I found a considerably more worn (than in the photo) headstone that, by running my fingers over the faded lettering, I could be certain belonged to Captain William Hennah R. N.

Bugs crawled over his headstone. It had been moved from his resting place (something I hate that the Church do and wish they would not) and leant up against a stone wall aside the church itself. Sap from the trees, and lichen, obscured virtually everything on the headstone except the name ‘William’ and a chalice-like ornament engraved into the top of the stone. Even the bold and distinctive ‘SACRED’ etched at the top was barely visible now.

I said that I don’t suppose he gets many visitors now – that perhaps even many of the locals don’t know who he was. It seemed painfully unfair to me that so great a man could have faded out into obscurity like this. The lack of acknowledgement or ceremony was upsetting. Bugs and insects crawled his headstone like it was just another piece of decaying matter; death left no respect for someone so respectable. I stood alone with him for a moment and cried. My lament was a complex one: in part that England does not make heroes like him anymore and seems likely never to do so again, and in part it was the pain at my own distance from a world I feel to love so much more. I was as close as I could ever be to a man 6ft down and 300 years dead and in a way this was so close but in another, I painfully remained stuck in this fickle, honourless, plastic and mundane world, stood in a cold graveyard dreaming about the dizzying heights of glory those warriors knew off Cape Trafalgar almost 300 years ago. There was a centuries-long silence between my life and his, and this proximity did not close it.

I hope, somehow, that he knew I was there – that I went to see him; that this insignificant person from an insignificant age cared that he once lived.

I struggled very much to keep from crying again, as my sister and I picked the beautiful pink flowers of a wild cyclamen growing in the graveyard, and lay them at his headstone, before I painfully turned away.

Last summer, I visited Portsmouth, and stood aboard the decks of HMS Victory. I stood upon the spot where Admiral Nelson was fatally shot, and sat down in the Orlop deck, in that dark place where he died several hours later. I wept then, as I did while stood as close as I can ever know to be the resting place of William Hennah.

It marks a growing tradition and a deep resolve to visit all of these great men – from the enemy forces as well as our own. Every one of them served with valour, honour, and courage that I find deeply inspiring, and it is in their judgement that I hold myself – not the modern world’s; their legacy that I care to remember – not ours; they, who lived and died for something, not we who live and die for nothing.

We have become unmoored from the inherent dignity and worth of human life. We engage in death with morbid glee and encourage the sadism with impunity, like hellhounds drooling at the prospect of a fresh kill for the day. We are energised by needless bloodshed – it is something to consume, like a news bulletin or a meme; and something to share – but not in the beautiful way of art. Rather, in the sick and sordid way of cholera or the plague.

We have forfeit our humanity for partisan absolutism, sacrificed truth for assent, and virtue for popularity. We are, as a species, unhinged, and walking ourselves with a cocksure and absurd certainty into a Hell of our own making.

No age in human history has made a stronger case for madness being the correct diagnosis for the collective – where sanity is the rare holdout of the hated individual whose heart aches at a world collapsing around them; a world in which a mob glorifies your slaughter and writes over the painful and beautiful complexity of your life with vitriolic slander; A world where your virtue is reminted as malevolence and your hopes and dreams will count for naught, let run away into total dilution with your lifeblood as it trickles from your warm, lifeless body on the roadside, to be processed by the same system as the nation’s sewage.

It is a harrowing time where your humanity will be renounced by the vile discourse of the mob and they will vindicate themselves in their miserable hatred, and that boot whose sole purpose is to extinguish the warm light of the human soul will stamp ever harder on the fading light of those who are left.

The business of the Devil makes bold profits at our dear cost.

Was there ever a more fitting time to mourn the loss of civilization and the loss of each individual cruelly spent in the fury – the life drained out of both – with but a single phrase? Here lies a dream.

And what do I rage at? I don’t even know. Part of me wants to curse a God I don’t believe in, as the unfairness of the world cuts its sordid stamp into the more sensitive parts of my heart. The world is becoming a more empty place of late, death ever more proximate stealing from life a steady stream of those whom I did not want to lose – most lately, a dear uncle.

I write this, now, in the immediate wake of the news that a friend – not the first in this same cursed year – has suffered a stroke. As I turn these thoughts into words he is being rushed into hospital. What comes next is not for me to know – he may sleep through eternity from this night, or he may not.

This laced pessimism and recurrent fury at the injustice of it all characterises the creed of a person who I do not wish to be, though. And this bothers me. I did not want to lose sight of wonder and beauty, wallowing in blackness and hopelessness for my finite time. But lately I have found myself unable to appreciate much of anything. I try not to grow resentful, but I do resent so much of what life has become.

Some may seek to console my by way of saying that, supposing God has a part to play in this, there’s a lesson in it about the value of life, and its fragility. I retort, a lesson I did not need teaching; a fact about which I was painfully and acutely already aware, and had learned hard long before this, also by death.

I struggle to see the perfection in a God that built this world. That we have to die is an unmitigated tragedy in itself, but the manner in which darkness takes us is cruel beyond defence. Cancer, a stroke – as in this case – and more besides, an agonising demise that strips you of your dignity and then your very self; there is a malice in this I can’t reconcile with perfection. It doesn’t belong here.

But North of Despair.

The wind is fair, the tide plays with the fate of ships, and the hour is not quite real. But it is now – at 17:65 by my reckoning – a time unknown to Greenwich and unacceptable to the Royal Navy, that The Good Ship Ephemeral Dawn is launched.

Built not to schedule, nor scale, but rhythm – one known only to her captain – Ephemeral Dawn is a ship laid down in a dockyard of near-despair, seasoned by a hopeful sun, optimistically destined for some lost utopia not yet charted on maps of the Known World.

I can’t know what awaits me on this endeavour. Perhaps I’ll discover new horizons, or perhaps the fears of those early seafarers will come true, and I will fall off the edge of the world, plummeting into a nameless abyss to be lost to time. But I would have tried and there is beauty in that. Like every tree that is struck by lightning; every flower trampled; every warrior slain; to fall, they all had to stand, and to stand was to defy darkness and defeat for so long as they could.

In that beautiful act of defiance, they left us something that lasted far beyond themselves. Something eternal; the seed of the oak from which this beautiful ship, Ephemeral Dawn, is built.

Hope.

Why Now?

I am, by my nature, a private individual, and beginning this blog marks a bold leap of faith for me. I have so little confidence before a camera that it may yet be some time until you know who I am by sight. But here you may know who I am by my heart, which I hope may through my words dance with yours, dear reader, on this gift of a journey we know to be life.

I have for years abhorred the exhibitionism of modern ‘influencer’ culture and seek not to imitate it here. I do, however, wish for my work and ideas to touch the hearts and minds of kindred spirits; to be part of a movement, if only of one, in pursuit of an antiquated but mature sort of good in this world. 

Ephemeral Dawn represents a bid at an escape from a life the world had not sold me on. That was a life I regarded to be devoid of adventure, meaningful growth, purpose, and beauty; one locked away at the back of an office, working so hard to be of no account, to die having left nothing behind by way of a legacy. And for all that, to have broadly hated doing it.

This, I hoped to resolve, would not be my future – and so Ephemeral Dawn was born. There are a good many things I feel I can write about here though, and which I would like to share with you. It seemed like it stood as good a chance as anything else I’d try.

There is some close symbolic depth to this particular time for its beginning, too. H.M.S. Victory (Nelson’s flagship at Trafalgar, and Jarvis’ flagship at Cape St. Vincent) was launched on the 7^th of May in 1765. Though 17:65 is not a real time, it sits essentially five minutes past six. On a 24-hour clock, that is 18:05 – the year that Victory and Nelson both sailed into eternity at Trafalgar: one on our side of mortality’s fragile precipice, and one harrowingly lost to the other in his finest hour. That their exeunt shall be my entrance is, I hope, a fitting and beautiful metaphor on life’s circularity; a legacy’s endurance, and a homage to two dear and treasured parts of English heritage. This is, not by accident, published on the 7^th of May, at 18:05.

Naming The Good Ship Ephemeral Dawn:

Back at secondary school, I started working on an idea for a novel set in the context of one of my deepest, and most enduring interests: the Royal Navy during the Napoleonic Wars. It was very much ignited by a childhood love of Hornblower, following C.S. Forester’s titular character through his career from a young Midshipman aboard H.M.S Justinian to his promotion up to Captain of H.M.S Hotspur, and beyond (in the books – sadly the films ended there). Mine, too, was to follow a young up-and-coming officer: a Lieutenant aboard the Ephemeral Dawn. I adore the name. I love how it sounds and how it looks, and think it suits the beauty and majesty of a ship perfectly. It is also so deeply rooted in nature and metaphor, and this, too, I love. It captures the idea of something beautiful but transient, and I couldn’t think of a better way to view our very lives. We, each of us, are the Captains of our own ship – our own fleeting beauty; our own life, our own Ephemeral Dawn.

There are too many (and yet not enough) great nautical fiction writers, though. C.S. Forester with Horatio Hornblower, Patrick O’Brian with Jack Aubrey and Stephen Maturin, Alexander Kent with Richard Bolitho, L. A. Meyer with ‘Bloody’ Jacky Faber, and though not nautical, I can’t overlook Bernard Cornwell’s Richard Sharpe stories as another major influence, and love of mine. Any comparison between my work and theirs would be unflattering, I worried, and so stifled by self-doubt and indecision, I shelved this idea to work on another one where I’d be freer to do my own thing without such rigid comparison to others. It is a fantasy-historical series by the name of Daughter of Fury, still very much in the works. I will introduce it properly at some point and link it here for you to look at, if you are interested. This, I would like to publish one day as a trilogy.

Charting The Course:

What this blog ultimately becomes will manifest at the interweave of effort and fate, and is not mine to foretell. I created it as a way out of a life I did not want to live; a way to escape some part of the world I struggle to love. I have a far stronger urge to experience the beauty of the world than I do to while away my life at the back of an office, expending the best years of my finite time under the relentless weight of a crushing bureaucracy.

It is hard for me to be very specific about what the blog will be, but it is my hope that Ephemeral Dawn will cultivate something special – the dancing of the human spirit. Awe, wonder, and reverence at what is truly good and meaningful in this life; a place to revel in beauty and freedom, where the intellectual and artistic spirit may flourish. A Liberation.

Free On Paper:

I have too many interests for there to be any appeal in confining myself to one of them, yet the less I am able to do that it feels like I merely alienate readers who are not interested in a vast amount of what I write. The tension borne of social media to ‘niche down’ is not abated here, but for now I do intend to resist it. I want this to be the place – for if indeed there is to be any, it is here – where I can write completely freely. The best I can say is that you will find reflections on history, nature, literature and philosophy, with some personal musings and pieces of my own creative writing too – all bound up in what may characterise a life’s pursuit: a yearning for meaning, and an admiration of beauty.

I hope that in the subject and content of things written about there is food for genuine thought, and that all of it might somehow tie into a desire to feed both the soul and the intellect. The intention is to do this with particular focus on the past, and on nature, where I believe wisdom is to be found in abundance.

I would be very happy if I was able to make you smile, or even laugh along the way, and happier still if I could leave you each time feeling inspired or hopeful, too.

So, welcome to Ephemeral Dawn; to the blog of a 24-year-old aspiring writer setting sail into the vastness of life. I have an enduring passion for writing, a love of nature, history, and beauty, and seek to pay homage to each here. Whether it be comfort, inspiration, knowledge or entertainment, I hope you will stay and find something of value here through my writing, dear reader.

In Loving Memory:

Though it is now that I set sail, it is an occasion also stung by tragedy as life often is, looking back at one we left behind. It was the 6^th of May that the tides played at too dear a cost.

The same sea over which one ship sails, is the one under which another ship sinks.

As I write these lines launching my Ephemeral Dawn, twilight closes for another soul in their harrowing, but dignified exit from life’s stage. Each of us on a different precipice, bound imminently to go over its edge into the feared nothingness that calls, completing life’s circularity in tragic harmony; one where my sunrise is his eclipse – both of us irrevocably undertaking a leap of faith from which there may be no return; one of us in search of a legacy, one of us to leave one behind; one of us to make memories, and one of us to remain only in them.

Ever in those memories you will remain, our hearts warmed by those delightful recollections of your cheeky humour and your most beautiful laugh. Rest in Peace, Paul.