There was little finesse and a lot of bloodshed in the way the British took on their opponents at sea

From the excellent Perilous Fight by Stephen Budiansky, an account of the naval aspects of the War of 1812. Page 132.

Since 1793 the Royal Navy in its encounters with the French had lost 10 ships to the enemy’s 377, which spread a layer of complacency over any deficiencies in its commanders. Nelson made a point of playing to Britain’s heroic image of herself in the tactics he pursued, and the image and results had reinforced one another: there was little finesse and a lot of bloodshed in the way the British took on their opponents at sea. Most battles of the Royal Navy were fought at extremely close range, where there was little choice but to kill or be killed and where seamanship and accurate gunfire mattered far less. The French, having guillotined most of their corps of professional sailors during the Revolution, took a similar view that zeal could substitute for skill and so were largely willing to fight on the same terms. The mayhem reached its zenith in the occasional but absolutely brutal boarding actions, which were hand-to-hand combat on a confined battlefield with no escape. Pistols, cutlasses, long-poled pikes, even fire axes, crowbars, clublike wooden belaying pins, and other tools at hand were used as weapons in what were basically free-for-alls for control of the ship. Casualties in single-ship engagements were known to reach the hundreds, and the bloodiness of such actions was spurred all the more by the Admiralty’s practice of judging the worth of a captain’s action by how many of his own crew were killed or wounded. On more than one occasion, an officer’s claim for promotion for victory in battle was turned down on the grounds that his “butcher’s bill” was not long enough.