One of the wounded men was Captain Wemyss, the captain of the Bellerophon's marines and a good friend of Cumby. Wemyss had survived the first onslaught of the musket fire from L'Aigle and had remained at his post on deck until he was hit in the arm. He was coming up the quarterdeck ladder with blood streaming from his shattered arm when he met Cumby who was trying to avoid speaking to any friends and messmates who were wounded in case his distress at their plight distracted him from carrying out his duty as commanding officer. However he felt it would be unkind not to speak to his friend.
'Wemyss, my good fellow,' he said, 'I'm sorry you've been wounded but I trust you will do well.'
To which Wemyss replied cheerfully, 'It is a mere scratch and I shall have to apologise to you by and by for having left the deck on so trifling occasion.' He was then entering the cabin to have his arm amputated. He later died from his wound. While the surgeons struggled to deal with the dozens of wounded sailors and marines, the officers organised groups of men to clear the wreckage on the deck and cut away the shattered topmasts and sails which were hanging overboard on trailing lengths of rigging. At 4 o'clock Cumby spotted five enemy ships from the unscathed van of their fleet tacking and making off to windward. He ordered the captain's cabin to be cleared and at 4.10 they fired every gun which could be brought to bear on the fleeing ships. One of them, a Spanish two-decker, was cut off and surrendered to the Minotaur, but the remaining four escaped. Shortly after 5 o'clock the Bellerophon's guns finally fell silent. The battle was effectively over.
Cumby noted that no fewer than nineteen of the enemy's line of battle ships had surrendered. One of them, the 74-gun Achille, was on fire, with flames and black smoke belching from her decks and gunports. Her crew were frantically abandoning ship and the British ship Prince had lowered her boats to pick up men from the water but the fire reached the magazine before everyone got clear. An eye witness recorded the horrific scene which followed:
In a moment the hull burst into a cloud of smoke and fire. A column of vivid flame shot up to an enormous height in the atmosphere and terminated by expanding into an immense globe, representing for a few seconds, a prodigious tree in flames, speckled with many dark spots, which the pieces of timber and bodies of men occasioned while they were suspended in the clouds.
At 5.30 the Bellerophon took possession of a second prize, the Spanish 74-gun ship Bahama. This was one of the ships which had fired on the Bellerophon as she cut through the enemy line and she had subsequently been on the receiving end of some devastating gunfire from the Bellerophon when approaching her from the stern at the height of the battle. The Bahama had then been attacked by the Colossus, had lost her mainmast and suffered the death of her captain who was shot in the head. The ship was such a shambles and had suffered such heavy casualties that her surviving officers decided to haul down her colours and surrender.
During the height of the battle a dense cloud of gunsmoke had blanketed the fighting ships as effectively as sea fog so that it was impossible for their crews to see anything clearly beyond the ships in the immediate vicinity. But, as the light westerly breeze blew away the smoke, a scene of utter devastation was revealed. The Combined Fleet, which had presented such a magnificent and colourful spectacle in the morning sunlight, was no more. Great ships with towering sails had been reduced to crippled hulks drifting helplessly on the Atlantic swell. The magnificent Spanish flagship Santisima Trinidad, of 140 guns, had been totally dismasted, and so had Villeneuve's flagship the Bucentaure, and the French ships Algeciras and Intrépide. The hulls of most of the enemy ships which had been on the receiving end of British gunnery were smashed and disfigured, their decks littered with dead and wounded bodies, the blood streaming from the scuppers. There was wreckage everywhere floating among the ships: broken masts and spars, hatches, capstan bars, gunport lids, hen coops, and barely recognisable fragments of figureheads, balustrades and stern decorations. Rowing among the wreckage were numerous boats searching for survivors, the sailors following the cries for help and heaving the bedraggled bodies aboard.
It was not till dusk that they became aware on the Bellerophon that Nelson had been killed. Collingwood had been forced to shift his flag to the frigate Euryalus because the Royal Sovereign had lost two of her masts, making it impossible for him to hoist signals. In the gathering dusk Cumby observed that the Euryalus was now carrying the lights of commander-in-chief and that there were no lights on board the Victory, 'from which we were left to draw the melancholy inference that our gallant our beloved Chief the incomparable Nelson had fallen.' Nelson had received his fatal wound at 1.35, half an hour after Captain Cooke had fallen. He had been walking on the quarterdeck of the Victory with Captain Hardy at his side when he was shot by a musketeer stationed in the mizentop of the French ship Redoubtable. The musket ball had entered his left shoulder, penetrated his chest, punctured his lung and lodged in his spine. He fell to the deck and when Hardy turned he was being lifted up by two seamen and the sergeant-major of marines. He told Hardy that they had done for him at last and that his backbone had been shot through. He was taken below to join the other wounded men in the cockpit and died three hours later at 4.30 pm.
The news spread slowly from ship to ship and had a profound effect on officers and men alike. One sailor later wrote that he was both sorry and glad that he had never set eyes on Nelson because 'all the men in our ships who have seen him are such soft toads, they have done nothing but blast their eyes, and cry, ever since he was killed.' Others were so stricken by his death that they could scarcely bring themselves to talk about it. There is a revealing passage in Cumby's letter to this effect: '. . . but so unwilling were we to believe what we could scarcely bring ourselves to doubt that I actually went on board the Euryalus the next morning and breakfasted with Admiral Collingwood from whom I received orders without being once told or even once asking the question whether Lord Nelson was slain.'
Collingwood had known Nelson for nearly thirty years and they had developed a mutual respect and affection for each other. It seems likely that he was so heartbroken by the death of his friend that he could not bring himself to speak of it for fear of breaking down in front of a subordinate officer. He showed his true feelings in his official despatch to the Admiralty which, like his letters home, reveals a sensitivity and warmth which he rarely betrayed to those around him. He wrote, 'My heart is rent with the most poignant grief for the death of a friend, to whom, by many years' intimacy ... I was bound by the strongest ties of affection - a grief to which even the glorious occasion in which he fell does not bring the consolation which perhaps it ought.'
On the Bellerophon they had worked steadily through the night, clearing away the wreckage strewn across the deck. The carpenters stopped up the holes caused by enemy gunfire and carried out emergency repairs, and the seamen refitted the damaged rigging. During the course of the morning after the battle they managed to get up jury topmasts and set sail. The ship was manageable again, which was just as well because the weather was deteriorating fast. The wind had risen during the night and was now blowing a fresh gale with frequent squalls of rain. By the evening it was evident, from the increasingly ominous swell from the west and the racing clouds overhead, that a big storm was heading their way. Before darkness fell Lieutenant Cumby ordered the crew to assemble on deck where he had the painful duty of reading the funeral service over the bodies of his friend Overton, and Captain John Cooke of whom he later wrote, 'more zeal, judgement and gallantry could not have been displayed than marked his conduct from the moment we saw the enemy to the close of his honourable and valuable life.' The two bodies were committed to the deep and the men wept for them and for the other shipmates they had lost during the battle. Out of a crew of 540, the Bellerophon had lost 27 men killed and 123 wounded. It was not the highest casualty list on the British side (the Victory had lost 57 killed and 102 wounded, the Colossus 40 dead and 160 wounded) but it was higher than average and reflected the fact that, for the third time in her life, the ship had been at the heart of the action in a major sea battle.