Vice-Admiral Pierre-Charles-Jean-Baptiste-Silvestre de Villeneuve (31 December 1763 – 22 April 1806) was a French Navy officer who served in the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars. He was in command of a Franco-Spanish fleet which was defeated by the British Royal Navy at the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805.
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Bucentaure was an 86-gun ship of the line of the French Navy, and the lead ship of her class. She was the flagship of Vice-Admiral Latouche Tréville, who died on board on 18 August 1804, and later of Vice-Admiral Pierre-Charles Villeneuve as the flagship of the Franco-Spanish fleet at the Battle of Trafalgar.
Bucentaure was named after the Venetian state barge Bucintoro which was destroyed by Napoleon after the fall of the Republic of Venice in 1797. While the Venetian name is of uncertain etymology (it may have originated in the bucinatores aboard who blew their instruments to herald the arrival of the Doge), the French Bucentaure's figurehead depicted a bucentaur: a mythical, centaur-like creature with the body of a bull and the head of a man.
The Battle of Trafalgar was a naval engagement that took place on 21 October 1805 between the Royal Navy and a combined fleet of the French and Spanish navies during the War of the Third Coalition. As part of Napoleon's planned invasion of the United Kingdom, the French and Spanish fleets combined to take control of the English Channel and provide the Grande Armée safe passage. The allied fleet, under the command of French admiral Pierre-Charles Villeneuve, sailed from the port of Cádiz in the south of Spain on 18 October 1805. They encountered a British fleet under Lord Nelson, recently assembled to meet this threat, in the Atlantic Ocean along the southwest coast of Spain, off Cape Trafalgar.
Nelson was outnumbered, with 27 British ships of the line to 33 French and Spanish, including the largest warship in either fleet, the Spanish Santísima Trinidad. To address this imbalance, Nelson sailed his fleet directly at the allied battle line's flank in two columns, hoping to break the line into pieces. Villeneuve had worried that Nelson might attempt this tactic, but for various reasons, failed to prepare for it. To add to the French crisis, their crews were inexperienced and poorly trained. The British plan worked almost perfectly; Nelson's columns split the Franco-Spanish fleet in three, isolating the rear half from Villeneuve's flag aboard Bucentaure. The allied vanguard sailed off while it attempted to turn around, giving the British temporary superiority over the remainder of their fleet. In the ensuing fierce battle 18 allied ships were captured or destroyed, while the British lost none.