Collingwood’s dog, Bounce, was on board the _Royal Sovereign_ at Trafalgar, tied up out of the way below, in comparative safety, on the orlop deck. According to Collingwood himself, Bounce did not like cannon firing. Wrote Collingwood about him, before the battle: “Bounce is my only pet now, and he is indeed a good fellow; he sleeps by the side of my cot, whenever I lie in one, until near the time of tacking, and then marches off, to be out of the hearing of the guns, for he is not reconciled to them yet.” After the battle, on his master being raised to the peerage, Bounce—as Collingwood whimsically describes in one of his home-letters—seemed to grasp the new situation and took to giving himself airs. “I am out of all patience with Bounce. The consequential airs he gives himself since he became a right honourable dog are insufferable. He considers it beneath his dignity to play with commoners’ dogs, and truly thinks that he does them grace when he condescends to lift up his leg against them. This, I think, is carrying the insolence of rank to the extreme, but he is a dog that does it!”[19]
As all the world knows, Collingwood never set foot in England after Trafalgar, doomed, poor homesick fellow, never more to see—
The pleasant strand of Northumberland And the lordly towers thereby.
He wore out his life on duty, waiting and watching at sea for nearly five long and weary years, for an enemy who did not dare to face him. The Admiralty could not spare him to come home.
“He stepped into his boat from Plymouth Dock,” says the writer of a biographical sketch of Collingwood published shortly after the Admiral’s death, “on the last day of April, 1805, and returned, five years after, a peer and a corpse.” Immediately before he embarked, Collingwood had been conversing with a brother officer, who records an affecting incident. “The last time I ever saw Lord Collingwood,” wrote Sir T. Byam Martin, “he was on the point of stepping into his boat, never again to touch the British shore. We walked together for half an hour, and as long as I live I shall remember the words with which, in his accustomed mildness of expression, he alluded to the sacrifices our professional duties exact of us. He told me the number of years he had been married, and the number of days he had been with his family since the war commenced (then of many years duration). ‘My family are _actually strangers to me_.’ He was greatly overcome by the feelings thus excited, and, taking me by the hand, he said, ‘What a life of privation is ours—what an abandonment of everything to our professional duty, _and how little do the people of England know the sacrifices we make for them_!’ With this he turned from me to hide the tear which ran down his manly cheek, and saying ‘Farewell!’ walked to his boat.”