ey said prayers before going aloft,
and with whom their best admiral, Mazzaredo, had refused to sail.
Moreover, they were fighting half-heartedly, lacking the inspiration
of a great national cause, without which victories are rarely won.

The defeat of the Spanish, as Jervis had foreseen, was timely.
Mantua had just capitulated; British efforts to secure an honorable
peace had failed; consols were at 51, and specie payments stopped
by the Bank of England; Austria was on the verge of separate
negotiations, the preliminaries of which were signed at Loeben on
April 18; France, in the words of Bonaparte, could now "turn all
her forces against England and oblige her to a prompt peace."[1]
The news of St. Vincent was thus a ray of light on a very dark
horizon. Its strategic value, along with the Battle of Camperdown,
has already been made clear.

[Footnote 1: CORRESPONDENCE, III, 346.]

The British fleet, after refitting at Lisbon, took up a blockade
of the Spanish at Cadiz which continued through the next two years.
Discontent and mutiny, which threatened with each fresh ship from
home, was guarded against by strict discipline, careful attention to
health and diet, and by minor enterprises which served as diversions,
such as the bombardment of Cadiz and the unsuccessful attack on Santa
Cruz in the Canary Islands, July 24-25, 1797, in which Nelson lost
his right arm.

[Illustration: THE NILE CAMPAIGN, MAY-AUGUST 1798]

_The Battle of the Nile_

Nelson's return to the Cadiz blockade in May, 1798, after months
of suffering in England, was coincident with the gathering of a
fresh storm cloud in the Mediterranean, though the direction in
which it threatened was still completely concealed. While Sicily,
Greece, Portugal and even Ireland were mentioned by the British
Admiralty as possible French objectives, Egypt was apparently not
thought of. Yet its strategic position between three continents
remained as important as in centuries past, controlling the trade
of the Levant and threatening India by land or sea. "The time is
not far distant," Bonaparte had already written, "when we shall feel
that truly to destroy England we must take possession of Egypt."
In point of fact the strength of England rested not merely on the
wealth of the Indies, but on her merchant fleets, naval control,
home products and manufactures, in short her whole industrial and
commercial development, too strong to be struck down by a blow in
this remot