Men of War: The Changing Face of Heroism in the 19th Century Navy

‘I think if you were to see the Neptune you would find her very much altered since you were on bd,’ Fremantle told Frank’s father, sloth, dyspepsia and ill-temper all dispersed by a single dinner with Nelson and the promise of the second place in the line in any coming action. ‘We are all now scraping the ship’s sides to paint like the Victory [black, with buff-coloured stripes running between the portholes], the fellows make such a noise I can hardly hear myself. Pray make my respects to Mrs Hastings & beg her [to have] no wit of apprehension about her son who has made many friends here, & who is able to take his own part.’

Opinions were still divided as to whether or not the French would come out, but with five ‘spy’ frigates posted close in to the city, and Nelson’s battle plan circulated among the captains, the fleet knew what was expected of them. In the brute simplicity of the tactics Hastings was to learn an invaluable lesson, but the great danger of breaking the line in the way Nelson intended was that it ceded the opening advantage to the enemy, exposing a sluggish handler like Neptune in the light October breezes to the full enemy broadsides for anything up to twenty minutes before she could get beneath a foe’s vulnerable stern.

Nobody in Neptune was under any illusion as to what that would mean, but nothing could contain the excitement when the signal from the inshore squadron finally came. ‘All hearts towards evening beat with joyful anxiety for the next day,’ Badcock wrote on 20 October, as Neptune answered the signal for a general chase, ‘which we hoped would crown an anxious blockade with a successful battle. When night closed in, the rockets and blue lights, with signal guns, informed us the inshore squadron still kept sight of our foes, and like good and watchful dogs, our ships continue to send forth occasionally a growly cannon to keep us on the alert, and to cheer us with the hope of a glorious day on the morrow.’

As partitions, furnishings and bulkheads were removed, decks cleared, livestock slaughtered – Fremantle had a goat on board that had provided him with milk – Neptune turned south-west to give her the weather gage in the coming action. From the signals of their ‘watchdogs’ they knew that the enemy were still moving in a southerly direction, and as dawn broke on 21 October, first one sail and then a whole ‘forest of strange masts’ appeared some eleven miles to leeward to show that the Combined Fleet was at last where Nelson wanted it.

The sun, William Badcock – midshipman of the forecastle and first in Neptune to see the enemy – remembered, ‘looked hazy and watery, as if it smiled in tears on many brave hearts which fate had decreed should never see it set … I ran aft and informed the officer of the watch. The captain was on deck in a moment, and ere it was well light, the signals were flying through the fleet to bear up and form the order of sailing in two columns.’

As the ship slipped into those atavistic rhythms that no one who witnessed them ever forgot, and hammocks were stowed, cutlasses and muskets distributed, powder horns and spare flintlocks issued, magazines and powder rooms unlocked, operating area prepared, and final letters written, full sail was set and Neptune strove to take her place in the line. In Nelson’s original battle plan Fremantle had been ordered to follow Temeraire, Superb and Victory in the weather division, but with only the short October day ahead of them, and speed crucial if the enemy were not to escape, precedence went out of the window in favour of an ad hoc order that left the two columns to sort themselves out, as sailing capacities dictated, behind Victory and the Royal Sovereign.

It was now that the ‘old Neptune, which never was a good sailer’, as William Badcock put it, ‘took it into her head to sail better that morning than I ever remembered’, and at about 10 a.m. she came up alongside Nelson’s Victory. Fremantle intended to ‘pass her and break the enemy’s line’, Badcock recalled, ‘but poor Lord Nelson hailed us from the stern-walk of the Victory, and said, “Neptune, take in your studding-sails and drop astern; I shall break the line myself.”’

It was probably the eleven-year-old Hastings’s sole glimpse of Nelson, but if he ever wondered what it was that gave him his unique hold over men, he did not have long to wait for an answer. As Neptune dropped astern of Victory, and the Temeraire slipped between them to take her place in the van, Nelson’s last signal before the order to ‘engage’ was relayed through the fleet. ‘At 11,’ the Neptune’s log laconically noted, ‘Answered the general signal, “England expects every man will do his duty”; Captain Fremantle inspected the different decks, and made known the above signal, which was received with cheers.’

He ‘addressed us at our Different Quarters in words few’, James Martin remembered, ‘but Intimated that … all that was Dear to us Hung upon a Ballance and their Happyness depended upon us and their safty allso Happy the Man who Boldly Venture his Life in such a Cause if he shold Survive the Battle how Sweet will be the Recolection be [sic] and if he fall he fall Covred with Glory and Honnor and Morned By a Greatfull Country the Brave Live Gloryous and Lemented Die.’

In the heavy swell and light winds – and to the sounds of ‘Rule Britannia’ and ‘Britons Strike Home’ drifting across the water from ships’ bands – Neptune closed on the enemy with agonising slowness. ‘It was a beautiful sight,’ Badcock wrote,

when their line was completed; their broadsides turned towards us, showing their iron teeth, and now and then trying the range of a shot to ascertain the distance, that they might, the moment we came within point blank (about six hundred yards), open the fire upon our van ships … Some of them were painted like ourselves – with double yellow sides, some with a broad single red or yellow streak; others all black, and the noble Santissima Trinidada (158), with four distinct lines of red, with a white ribbon between … her head splendidly ornamented with a colossal group of figures, painted white, representing the Holy Trinity … This magnificent ship was destined to be our opponent.

It was not just a ‘beautiful sight’, but an exhilarating and terrifying one, and at the stately walking pace at which the fleets closed there was all the time in the world to take it in. At 11.30 Neptune’s log at last recorded the signal ‘to locate the enemy’s line, and engage to leeward’, and as first Victory and then Temeraire broke through ahead, and Neptune prepared to receive her opening broadsides, Fremantle ordered everyone, except the officers, to lie down to reduce casualties.

Until this moment Hastings had been on the quarterdeck with Fremantle, an unusually small, frightened and superfluous spectator, neatly dressed in the new suit Betsey Fremantle had had made for him, but to his future chagrin the First Lieutenant now ordered him to a safer circle of hell below. ‘A man should witness a battle in a three-decker from the middle deck,’ a young marine lieutenant in Victory later wrote, struggling to evoke the blind, smoke-filled, deafening chaos of the battle that awaited Hastings as he made his way down to the lower decks of Neptune,

for it beggars all description: it bewilders the senses of sight and hearing. There was the fire from above, the fire from below, besides the fire from the deck I was upon, the guns recoiling with violence, reports louder than thunder, the decks heaving and the sides straining. I fancied myself in the infernal regions, where every man appeared a devil. Lips might move, but orders and hearing were out of the question, everything was done by signs.

Even to those still on the quarterdeck, the smoke of battle and the tangle of fallen masts and rigging had already obscured Victory, but as Neptune closed on her target, the gap that Nelson had punched between Villeneuve’s Bucentaure and Redoubtable widened to welcome her. For the final ten minutes of her approach Neptune was forced to take the combined fire of three enemy ships, until at 12.35 she at last broke through astern of Bucentaure and, in the perfect tactical position, delivered a broadside from thirty yards’ range. ‘At 12.35, we broke their line,’ the log reads – a typical mix of understatement, spurious accuracy, guesswork and partial knowledge.

At 12.47, we engaged a two-deck ship, with a flag at the mizzen. At 1.30, entirely dismasted her, she struck her colours; and bore down and attacked the Santa Trinidada, a Spanish four-decker of 140 guns … raked her as we passed under her stern; and at 1.50 opened our fire on her starboard quarter. At 2.40, shot away her main and mizzen masts; at 2.50, her foremast; at 3, she cried for quarter, and hailed us to say they had surrendered; she then stuck English colours to the stump of her main mast; gave her three cheers.

Neptune herself was in little better shape – ‘standing and running rigging much cut; foretop-gallant and royal yard shot away … wounded in other places; fore yard nearly shot in two, and ship pulled in several places’ – but as the smoke cleared they caught their first overview of the shambles around them. ‘We had now Been Enverloped with Smoak Nearly three Howers,’ wrote James Martin. ‘Upon this Ships [Santa Trinidada] striking the Smoak Clearing a way then we had a vew of the Hostle fleet thay were scattred a Round us in all Directions Sum Dismasted and Sum were Compleat wrecks Sum had Left of Fireng and sum ware Engagen with Redoubled furey it was all most imposeble to Distinguish to what Nation thay Belonged.’

It was a momentary respite – ‘but a few minets to take a Peep a Round us’ – but in the midst of this chaos they could see Victory and Temeraire still ‘warmly engaged’ and, more critically, ‘the six van ships of the enemy bearing down to attack’ them. In his original memorandum Nelson had anticipated this second phase of the battle, and as separate ship-actions continued to the rear of them, Neptune, Leviathan, Conqueror and Agamemnon manoeuvred to form a rough line of defence. ‘At 3.30, opened fire on them,’ Neptune’s log continued, ‘assisted by the Leviathan and Conqueror; observed one of them to have all her masts shot away by our united fire.’

With nearly all her own sails shot away, however, and not ‘a brace or bowline left’, Neptune was in no state to give chase when the remaining enemy abandoned their attack and escaped to southward. For another hour or so the fight continued around them in a mix of close actions and long-range duels, but for Neptune – and, at 4.30, just a quarter of an hour after she had ceased firing, Nelson himself – the battle was over. ‘Three different powers to rule the main,’ ran a popular song reflecting on the fate of the three ‘Neptunes’ that had fought at Trafalgar,

Assumed old Neptune’s name:

One from Gallia, one from Spain,

And one from England came.

The British Neptune as of yore,

Proved master of the day;

The Spanish Neptune is no more,

The French one ran away.

In the immediate aftermath of the battle, though, as carpenters and surgeons went to work with their knives and saws, corpses were flung overboard, and the news of Nelson’s death spread through the fleet, there was little temptation to triumphalism. During his last moments Nelson had repeatedly enjoined Hardy to drop anchor at the end of the day, and yet for some inexplicable reason Collingwood decided against it, condemning his scattered and dismasted fleet itself to every sailor’s nightmare of a heavy swell, a freshening wind and a perilous lee shore.

It would have been harder to say which stuck most vividly in men’s memories of Trafalgar, the battle itself or its terrible aftermath, as the stricken members of the fleet fought for their lives and prizes against a gale that was of a piece with everything that had gone before. In spite of her damage the Neptune was actually in a better state than most to ride it out, and after taking the Royal Sovereign in tow the following day, she was deployed again on the twenty-third to counter a bold enemy attempt to recapture what it could of its lost ships.

With the weather worsening again after a brief respite – the barometer reading that night at the Royal Observatory just south of Cádiz was the lowest ever recorded – and the shattered Combined Fleet in no state to renew a general action, anxieties in Neptune rapidly turned to their hard-won prize. From the moment they had gone into action the towering Santissima Trinidada – the largest battleship in the world – had been marked as theirs, and their first sight of her after the battle, when a prize crew under William Badcock went aboard to take possession, provided a bloody testament to the appalling destruction Neptune’s ‘beautiful firing’ had inflicted. ‘She had between 3 and 400 killed and wounded,’ Badcock told his father, ‘her Beams where coverd with Blood, Brains, and peices of Flesh, and the after part of her Decks with wounded, some without Legs and some without an Arm, what calamities War brings on.’

As conditions grew more desperate than ever, and self-interest gave way to self-preservation, Collingwood gave the order to ‘sink, burn and destroy’ all prizes, and Badcock’s thwarted crew went to work in the dark and mountainous seas. ‘We had to tie the poor mangled wretches around their waists, or where we could,’ another of Neptune’s officers recalled, as lower gun ports were opened, holes cut in the hull, and the last of the wounded winched off, ‘and lower them into a tumbling boat, some without arms, others no legs, and lacerated all over in the most dreadful manner.’

There were 407 taken off in the Neptune’s boats alone – a last boat went back for the ship’s cat, spotted perched on the muzzle of a gun as the Trinidada rolled helplessly in her death throes – and shortly after midnight the pride of the Spanish fleet and Neptune’s prize-money went to the bottom. ‘I am afraid this brilliant Action will not put much money in my pocket,’ wrote Fremantle – unusually benign for him, given that he had nothing more tangible to show for Trafalgar than the Trinidada’s pug dog (the cat had gone to Ajax),

but I think much may arise out of it ultimately. This last Week has been a scene of Anxiety and fatigue beyond any I ever experienced … I am at present towing the Victory and the Admiral has just made the signal for me to go with her to Gibraltar … We have ten men killed and 37 Wounded, which is very trifling when compared to some of the other Ships, however we alone have certainly the whole credit of taking the Santissima Trinidada, who struck to us alone. Adml. Villeneuve was with me over two days, I found him a very pleasant and Gentlemanlike man, the poor man was very low! … This fatigue and employment has entirely driven away the bile and if poor Nelson had not been among the slain I should be most completely satisfied.

His letter is dated ‘off Cadiz the 28th Oct. 1805’. He was right to be satisfied. By any other measure than a butcher’s bill the Neptune had acquitted herself heroically. ‘7 November,’ reads the ship’s log ten days later, as they made passage for Gibraltar: ‘Captain Fremantle read a letter of thanks from Vice Admiral Collingwood to all officers & men belonging to the Fleet for their conduct on the 21st Octo. Performed Divine Service & returned thanks to the Almighty God for the victory gained on the day.’ Frank Hastings would have done well to have forgotten his father’s atheism and joined in. At the age of just eleven he had survived the storm of the century and the greatest battle ever fought under sail. The next time – twenty-two years later at Navarino – there would be an action of similar proportions, his brilliance and daring would have gone a long way towards provoking it.

III

One of the great disappointments of Hastings’s story is that there is neither a portrait of the unusually small, fair-haired lad who had fought at Trafalgar, nor any surviving account from him of his part in the battle. It is clear from the Fremantle correspondence that Frank wrote an indignant protest at being sent below, but it would seem likely that his disappointed father destroyed that along with all his other letters in the aftermath of the Kangaroo incident, reducing his boy at one embittered stroke to a silent and anonymous role in all the great dramas of his early life.

There is an unusually rich and varied archive to fill the gaps – captains’ letters, testimonials, Admiralty minutes, ships’ logs, tailors’ bills – but nothing quite makes up for the absence of Frank’s own voice. It is easy enough to follow the external outline of his career over the next six years, but the formative steps that operated on his genetic inheritance to transform him from the small frightened boy on the quarterdeck of Neptune into the commander of the Kangaroo remain frustratingly, elusively, out of reach.

By the time one hears his own voice, the movement and rhythms of a man-of-war, the mouldering damp and discomfort, the proximity of death and violence, the chronic sleeplessness and brutal intimacy that were the universal experience of any young officer were so much a part of his nature that they pass unnoticed. In the youthful letters of a Peel or Goodenough there is a vivid sense of what it was like to be a boy at sea, but when Hastings finally emerges from his midshipman’s chrysalis it is as the finished product, as inured to the hardships and dangers of naval life as he is to the sense of wonder and curiosity that clearly once touched him.

There are times, in fact – so complete is the absence of ‘colour’, so absolute the sense of purpose and concentration in his adult letters – when it feels as though one is following a man through a sensory desert. Over the last ten years of the Napoleonic Wars he served and fought from the China Seas to the Gulf of Mexico, yet one would no more know from Hastings what it felt like to be shipwrecked in the icy black waters off Halifax than how shattering it was to drag a massive naval gun through the swamps and bayous of New Orleans.

The magical island fortresses of the Ligurian Sea, the baroque grandeur of Valetta, the feckless elegance of Nauplia’s Palamidi fortress, the harsh and brilliant clarity of the Cyclades, the romance of the Dardanelles, the numinous charge that attaches itself to the landscape of Greece – these were the background to his fighting life, but one would need one’s longitudes and latitudes to know it. It was not that Hastings was blind to either people or place – he was a naval officer trained to see and record – but where other men looked at modern Nafpaktos and saw historic Lepanto, Hastings looked at Lepanto and saw Nafpaktos; where other men saw the harbour from which the Argo sailed or the little ribbon of island on which Spartan soldiers first surrendered, Hastings saw only currents, breezes, lines of fire and anchorages.

It cannot have been always so – he was too intelligent, too widely cultured, too well-liked, too much a man of the Age of Byron for that – and no such child can have excited the intense affection and dread with which family and friends awaited the news from Trafalgar. The first despatches from Collingwood had reached Falmouth after a voyage of only eight days, but for the families in the great houses, cottages, vicarages and deaneries that serviced the navy the arrival of the schooner Pickle signalled just the start of the waiting. ‘Thursday 7th Nov. I was much alarmed by Nelly’s ghastly appearance immediately after breakfast,’ Betsey Fremantle wrote in her journal, the day after Collingwood’s despatches reached London,

who came in to say Dudley had brought from Winslow the account that a most dreadful action had been fought off Cadiz, Nelson & several Captains killed, & twenty ships were taken. I really felt undescribable misery until the arrival of the Post, but was relieved from such a wretched state of anxious suspense by a letter from Lord Garlies, who congratulated me on Fremantle’s safety & the conspicuous share he had in the Victory gained on the 21st off Cadiz … I fear the number of killed and wounded will be very great when the returns are sent. How thankful I am Fremantle has once more escaped unhurt. The accounts greatly shook my nerves.

For the Hastings family, immured in the middle of the English countryside with their maps and their fears, the wait was still longer. ‘I should certainly not have delayed so long writing to you had I not so much leisure on my hands,’ Frank’s father at last wrote to Warren Hastings more than six weeks after the battle.

Great inclination to oblige, frequent opportunities of doing it and a thorough conviction of its propriety, all this made the matter so easy that I never failed every morning at breakfast to declare my intention, always however determining to put it off to the last moment of the post, in order to send you news, which not coming, I thought it hardly worthwhile to trouble you, and so it went on until the glorious victory of Trafalgar was announced when my anxiety for your little protégé my son Frank only eleven years old who was on board the Neptune so damped my spirits, & absorbed every other consideration, as to render me unfit for any other thing, and it was not till about ten days ago that our minds were set at ease by the returns of the Neptune at last arriving, and also seeing a letter from my little Hero which completely dissipated every anxiety.

The wait had put a strain on even his oldest and closest friendship – Lord Moira, thinking that Frank was with Cornwallis in the Channel had written flippantly to Charles Hastings – but when the news came everything was forgotten in the flood of relief and goodwill. ‘Most truly do I congratulate you,’ Moira wrote almost immediately again, ‘… on the safety of your Frank … When he comes to be prosing in his cane chair at Fourscore it will be a fine thing to have to boast of sharing the glory in the Battle of Trafalgar.’

‘My Dear General,’ wrote the Duke of Northumberland – another old soldier in the American Wars with a son in the navy,

I have longed for some time to congratulate you on the English Victory gained over the combined fleets of France & Spain, but could not do so till I saw an authenticated List of the killed and wounded. Last night relieved me from my difficulties, & brought me the Gazette Extraordinary, & I now therefore take the earliest opportunity of writing to say how happy I am that my friend your youngster has had his share in so glorious a Victory unhurt. I hope he likes the Sea as well as ever, and flatter myself, He will in time prove another Lord Collingwood. I should have said Nelson but that I would prefer his being a Great Living Naval Character, to a dead one.

There was more than a touch of Jane Austen’s Mrs Musgrove about Parnell Hastings, and as the letters flowed in at Willesley anxiety gave way to a pride every bit as extravagant. ‘Mrs Hastings is a great bore,’ Fremantle wrote back to his wife, after she had complained of the Hastings dragging ‘poor’ Captain Arklom – previously in Neptune – to dinner to ply him with ‘silly questions about their Boy’.

I am afraid Hastings will shoot me, for the first Lieutenant thinking such a small child could not be of use on Deck desired him to go below, which he did without remorse, but is now ashamed of it and have wrote to his father something on the Subject, you must call upon the Woman, and say what is really true that he is a very clever and well disposed boy, and very attentive to his Navigation, if you are half as fidgety about your Doddy who seems to occupy you so much, I will break every bone in your skin.

There is a foreshadowing here of the older Hastings – morbidly sensitive, proud, honourable, intense – and probably a glimpse, too, of the endless teasing and ragging that was part and parcel of a gun-room world that hovered between the chivalries of war and the brute realities of a floating prep school. ‘Young Hastings get [sic] Volumes by every opportunity,’ Fremantle wrote to his wife, as the Neptune resumed blockading duties off Cádiz. ‘His mother put his letters to my address without an envelope, but the part opposite the seal concluded with your Affe. Mother it made no difference, as I did not read a Sylable [sic], indeed if I had I conclude it contained much what Mothers write to their Children at that age.’

Child or not, though – and Hastings was now just twelve – there was a career to be planned for him if he was to be a second Collingwood, and on 2 June 1806 he was transferred by boat from the Neptune to the forty-two-gun Sea Horse under the command of Captain John Stewart. In his later years Hastings never forgot the seamanship and sheer endurance demanded by a winter blockade in Neptune, but the frigate and not the lumbering three-decker was the glamour ship of the navy, the vessel in which captains made their names and fortunes and young officers and midshipmen had their chance to punch above their rank and weight.

The move was the making of Hastings – the Sea Horse the perfect training in the kind of coastal warfare he would make his own – but before that there was convoy duty and a return to England for the first time in eighteen months. ‘My boy of Trafalgar is just arrived,’ Sir Charles wrote proudly to Warren Hastings from Willesley on 2 November, only five days after the Sea Horse anchored at Portsmouth: ‘he appears an unlicked cub – but is considerably advanced in nautical knowledge for his age and time of service – he is only thirteen [twelve in fact] last Febry has been but a year and a half at sea, and is as capable of keeping a day’s reckoning, putting the ship about, in short navigating a ship on board, and that is according to the Capt’s testimony.’

This was not all blind partiality – the only fault Captain Stewart could find with his charge was that he would not grow – and Warren Hastings was more than happy to respond in kind. ‘I think you have much happiness yet in store,’ he wrote back. ‘You will live to see one of your sons a finished gentleman; and the other standing on the summit of glory as a British seaman. Charles Imhoff [Warren Hastings’s stepson] tells me he never saw a youth so much improved, in knowledge, manners or manliness, as the latter in the short time in which he has not seen him.’

Frank had just two months at Willesley – his first holiday at the old Abney seat to which his parents had recently returned – and it was probably as well that he could call on his blockading experience to prepare him for the rigours of home life. He had been only two years old when his father moved to Jersey, and the family’s long absence had left the house in a state of almost comic dilapidation, its roof leaking, draughts howling, the beds a misery, and the dining table so small – Sir Charles complained to Warren Hastings – that the family could not dress for dinner until after dinner because they spent their meals kicking each other under the table and filthying each other’s clothes.

Almost nothing is left now of Willesley – the ornamental lake, the contours of an eighteenth-century landscaped park – but a Vanbrugh-esque stable gateway of Cyclopean proportions gives some idea of what Sir Charles Hastings took on when the family returned to their ‘ruined mansion’. A surviving estate book underlines how seriously he took his duties, but if he did all he could to indulge his wife’s and his son Charles’s passion for the place, he remained at heart the man of affairs he had always been, stoically resigned to finding himself dependent on the London mail or a sight of his boy, Frank, for proof that there was a world beyond his Willesley exile.

He was determined, too, that Frank’s future should not be forgotten while he was at home, taking on the best mathematics tutor that he could find for him; but by the beginning of January 1807 the Sea Horse was being fitted for sea and the end of the holiday was in sight. ‘I have been much more interested about the brilliant exploits of Sir J. Duckworth in the Archipelago, or rather against the Porte,’ Sir Charles wrote rather prematurely to Warren Hastings on 17 April, after the Sea Horse had been diverted from the Far East to the Mediterranean to face a growing Turkish threat in the Aegean, ‘and if it is true that he has forced the Dardanelles and destroyed the whole Turkish navy – Lady Hastings may sleep in peace for she has been much alarmed at the boy going up the Mediterranean and being taken by one of their corsairs and perhaps undergoing a certain operation that would fit him more for the Seraglio than the Navy.’

Frank was well out of the dismal failure of Duckworth’s expedition, and if he had had to forgo Warren Hastings’s Eastern patronage, the Hastings name worked just as well closer to home. ‘I have much pleasure in acquainting you your Dear Frank is in the highest health and spirits,’ General Sir John Smith, an old colleague of Frank’s father on Sir Henry Clinton’s staff during the American War of Independence, wrote from Gibraltar on 21 July: ‘he dined with me about ten days since and Sailed again two days after to join Lord Collingwood … I beg my Dr Sir Charles will rest assured that his old academical fellow poet – Jack Smith – will make a point of paying all possible attention to his son Frank Hastings and that he shall have a mother in Mrs Smith when necessary – anything you may wish to send him – direct to my care and he shall receive it safe.’

With the inevitable lag in news there would always be something for Lady Hastings to worry about, and Mrs Smith was already too late with her motherly attentions. ‘We are just returned from a rather successful cruise,’ John Stewart, another bold, intelligent and talented frigate captain, who had circumnavigated the globe with Vancouver, had written to Sir Charles a fortnight earlier,