On 21 October 2005, Britons celebrated the two-hundredth anniversary of the Battle of Trafalgar with an international fleet review, parties, concerts, fireworks, wreath-laying ceremonies at St Paul’s and on board HMS Victory, and a nationwide network of beacons, the first of which was lit by the Queen. On 21 October 2013, celebrations were considerably more muted, except at the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich, where the new permanent eighteenth-century naval gallery opened. It is hardly surprising that the Museum chose the anniversary of Nelson’s greatest victory and his death to open a gallery entitled Nelson, Navy, Nation: The story of the Royal Navy and the British people, 1688-1815. Two hundred and eight years later, Nelson continues to draw crowds, and the Museum hopes that his celebrity will bring visitors inside for the next decade or more.

But as the gallery aims to show, the story of the Royal Navy in the eighteenth century is much more than the story of Nelson. At the beginning of the century, the Royal Navy was roughly comparable to her European rivals. As recently as 1667, a Dutch fleet had sailed up the Medway, burned more than a dozen ships, and towed away the Royal Charles. Twenty years later, England’s shores were still not safe: William III came to power on the back of an amphibious invasion. Extended combat operations were difficult, plagued by disease and supply problems. But by the end of the eighteenth century, the Royal Navy bestrode the world’s oceans. Its wartime size had tripled to include nearly 150,000 sailors, and it could keep those men relatively healthy and well-supplied for months or years at a time. During the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, Britain’s Royal Navy won every major fleet battle: the Glorious First of June, St Vincent, Camperdown, the Nile, Copenhagen, and Trafalgar. But it also performed countless less-glamorous operations in support of the Allied effort against Napoleon, whisking the Portuguese royal family away to Brazil in 1808, supplying Wellington’s armies, and protecting vital trade routes and diplomatic relations around Europe’s seas.

Nelson, Navy, Nation tells this story, though its approach is thematic rather than narrative: the timeline of events, which strangely reads right to left, is relegated to small print along one wall. Above the timeline are paintings of notable battles of the century. It is one of the few sections of the gallery that explicitly deals with the first half of the eighteenth century. The Museum’s collection is heavily slanted towards Nelson’s Navy rather than Vernon’s, though there is a useful display contrasting the material culture of Vernon’s celebrity with Nelson’s. Opposite the timeline, the gallery unfolds in a series of alcoves and display cases separated by glass walls and mirrors that provide no clear path for visitors but instead encourage them to browse the world of the late eighteenth-century Navy. The flooring mimics the deck of a ship, and the vertical white lights recall a ship’s sails. Loud noises and cramped spaces around the gruesome instruments on the surgeon’s table recreate the chaos of battle below decks. A letter written by a midshipman to his parents during Christmas dinner displays the hilarious effects of alcohol on handwriting. But the gallery is more than a series of vignettes: its most impressive thematic arguments link Navy to Nation. Though it is buried in a corner, the display case housing the variety of cheaply-produced consumer goods mourning Nelson’s death is particularly effective at emphasizing the ways in which the Navy was present in the lives of Britons with little direct connection to the sea. A video display simplifies John Brewer’s fiscal-military state argument from The Sinews of Power to demonstrate the positive feedback loop of trade and trade protection that helped the Navy grow. A large map at the end of the gallery shows the diverse origins of the men on board the ships at the Battle of Trafalgar, though the map’s symbols are not sized to be exactly proportional to the number they represent. This flaw actually works out well in practice, because it emphasizes that every county in the British Isles was represented, rather than that the largest group of sailors came, unsurprisingly, from London.

The gallery’s other great strength is its integration of new research. The least obvious example is the interactive recreation of the Battles of Trafalgar and the Nile. Before the two-hundredth anniversary of the former battle, a group of academics and enthusiasts known as the Inshore Squadron meticulously recreated the positions and movements of each of the seventy-four ships involved. The curators have replicated their work for the Nile, though the task was simpler since the French fleet was at anchor for much of the battle. Nevertheless, the average visitor to the gallery will probably be unaware of the amount of effort (and controversy) behind the simulation and instead much more interested in trying out the 3-D zoom feature. More obviously demonstrating new research is another interactive set whose motion-sensitive technology derives from the Xbox Kinect (perhaps the curators decided that new research demanded new technology?). It quizzes visitors about the lives of ordinary sailors, and most of the questions are designed to deliver maximum surprise, even to those who know little about naval history. For example, the possible answers to the question, ‘What percentage of sailors were forced to join the Navy by the press gang?’ are 16%, 27%, 50%, and 82%. Few visitors are savvy enough to slide over to the surprisingly low but correct 16%; most shuffle their feet or wave their hands awkwardly to try to manipulate the interface and wait for the time to expire to find out the correct answer. Younger visitors are, unsurprisingly, more likely to find success here. The attempt to integrate technology into the gallery is commendable, but more commendable is the integration of new research.

The gallery’s problem areas are few and far between. The alcove devoted to the Navy’s officers states that many came from wealthy families: in fact, at least half of all officers came from what could be described as professional backgrounds. New research suggests that while a prominent minority of officers were wealthy, the majority were members of the ill-defined ‘middling sort’. Another problem area is the gallery’s one and only gun, a squat, ugly carronade. The display built next to it shows the different kinds of shot – grape, chain, bar, round – used in combat by suspending them in a distractingly bright white plastic framework. It takes a few moments to figure out what the intention of the display is, and few visitors linger there. These criticisms are minor, however: the gallery largely succeeds in recreating the world of the Navy and linking it to the Nation.

Putting Nelson in the context of the eighteenth-century Navy is the gallery’s greatest challenge, though. Hundreds of biographies and dozens of memorials scattered around the world, from Trafalgar Square to Nelson, New Zealand, have made Nelson the very embodiment of the Navy in the popular imagination. Generations of children have grown up reading stories of young Nelson’s fight with a polar bear or his vision of a radiant orb of patriotism that inspired him to give his life for his country. The gallery’s challenge is to balance the heroic legend of Nelson with the historical realities of the Navy in which he served. Given Nelson’s place in the national myth, it is unsurprising that the National Maritime Museum has a wealth of Nelson memorabilia. There are no less than six oil paintings of Nelson on display and only four oil paintings of any other officers: that ratio is not significant in and of itself, but it does demonstrate the ways in which the curators have chosen to emphasize Nelson’s uniqueness. The three examples of contemporary officers’ uniforms are easy to ignore in the face of the Museum’s most famous Nelson artefact, the uniform he was wearing when he died, bullet-hole included. Nelson quotations dot the walls, while beneath them cases display the highlights and lowlights of his career: his despair in one of the first letters he wrote after he lost his right arm is juxtaposed with the combination fork/knife he designed to help him eat with one hand. In other words, the gallery is as thorough in its treatment of Nelson as it is in its argument that the Navy was an integral part of the Nation. The result is that viewers can take what they want from the gallery: if Nelson is what brought them to the second floor, then Nelson they will find; if the world of Forester and O’Brian is their interest, then the gallery brings that world to life. Most importantly, those who come for Nelson will have ample opportunities to learn about his Navy and Nation, and vice versa. There is no higher compliment for a permanent gallery.

Nelson, Navy, Nation: The story of the Royal Navy and the British people, 1688–1815 is a new permanent gallery at the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich.