th no scattering of the French
forces, promised to decoy Nelson away to the Morea and Egypt, while
the Toulon and Rochefort squadrons proceeded to Boulogne.

The September schemes hopelessly miscarried. Gantheaume did not elude
Cornwallis, and remained shut up in Brest. Missiessy escaped from
Rochefort, sailed to the West Indies, where he did some damage and
then sailed home again. "He had taken a pawn and returned to his own
square."[328] Villeneuve slipped out from Toulon (January 19th, 1805),
while Nelson was sheltering from westerly gales under the lee of
Sardinia; but the storm which promised to renew his reputation for
good luck speedily revealed the weakness of his ships and crews.

"My fleet looked well at Toulon," he wrote to Decres, Minister of
Marine, "but when the storm came on, things changed at once. The
sailors were not used to storms: they were lost among the mass of
soldiers: these from sea-sickness lay in heaps about the decks: it was
impossible to work the ships: hence yard-arms were broken and sails
were carried away: our losses resulted as much from clumsiness and
inexperience as from defects in the materials delivered by the
arsenals."[329]

Inexperience and sea-sickness were factors that found no place in
Napoleon's calculations; but they compelled Villeneuve to return to
Toulon to refit; and there Nelson closed on him once more.

Meanwhile events were transpiring which seemed to add to Napoleon's
naval strength and to the difficulties of his foes. On January 4th,
1805, he concluded with Spain a treaty which added her naval resources
to those of France, Holland, and Northern Italy. The causes that led
to an open rupture between England and Spain were these. Spain had
been called upon by Napoleon secretly to pay him the stipulated sum of
72,000,000 francs a year (see p. 437), and she reluctantly consented.
This was, of course, a covert act of hostility against England; and
the Spanish Government was warned at the close of 1803 that, if this
subsidy continued to be paid to France, it would constitute "at any
future period, when circumstances may render it necessary, a just
cause of war" between England and Spain. Far from complying with this
reasonable remonstrance, the Spanish Court yielded to Napoleon's
imperious order to repair five French warships that had taken refuge
in Ferrol from our cruisers, and in July, 1804, allowed French seamen
to travel thither overland to complete the crews of th