ic Rock,
when the west wind would assert its power over its feebler adversary,
and unless he was in a position to fetch an anchorage behind the Rock
or in the bay, their fate was sealed for days, and sometimes weeks, in
hard beating to prevent as little ground being lost as possible. But
ofttimes they were drifted as far back as Cape de Gata in spite of
daring feats of seamanship in pressing their vessels with canvas until
every spar, sail, and rope was overstrained. A traditional story of
sailors of that period was that only a fast clipper schooner engaged
in the fruit trade and a line-of-battle ship which fired her lee guns
on every tack was ever known to beat through this channel, which
mystified the sailors' ideas of God. They could not understand how He
could have committed such an error in planning the universe which so
tried the spirits of His loyal believers!

We know how catholic Nelson was in his religious views; and his feats
of expressive vocabulary, which was the envy of his class at the time,
became their heritage after he had accomplished his splendid results
and passed into the shadows. Such things as the strength of the
adverse sea winds, his experience of the capriciousness of the
official mind--a capriciousness which might be reflected in the public
imagination were he not to be wholly successful in getting hold of the
French fleet, and the indignity of having a man like Sir John Orde put
over him, all filled his sensitive nature with resentment against the
ordinances of God and man. His complaints were always accompanied with
a devotional air and an avowal of supreme indifference to what he
regarded as the indecent treatment he received at the hands of the
amateurish bureaucrats at the Admiralty. At times they were out of
humour with the great chieftain, and perhaps at no time did they make
him feel their dissatisfaction more than when adverse winds, a crazy
fleet, and deadly current were eating deep into his eager soul at a
time when the genius of seamanship was unavailing in the effort to get
through into the Atlantic in pursuit of the French fleet, which his
instinct told him was speeding towards the West Indies.

Sir John Orde, who was an aversion to him (as well he might be), had
seen the French fleet off Cadiz, and failed to procure him the
information as to their course. Nelson believed, and properly
believed, that an alert mind would have found a way of spying out the
enemy's intentions, bu