Napoleon to
some extent modified his strategic arrangements. The essential
feature of the scheme remained unaltered. It was to effect the
junction of the different parts of his naval force and thereupon
to dominate the situation, by evading the several British fleets
or detachments which were watching his. Before Spain joined him
in the war his intention was that his escaping fleets should
go out into the Atlantic, behind the backs, as it were, of the
British ships, and then make for the English Channel. When he
had the aid of Spain the point of junction was to be in the West
Indies.

The remarkable thing about this was the evident belief that the
command of the sea might be won without fighting for it; won,
too, from the British Navy which was ready, and indeed wished,
to fight. We now see that Napoleon's naval strategy at the time
of Trafalgar, whilst it aimed at gaining command of the sea, was
based on what has been called evasion. The fundamental principle
of the British naval strategy of that time was quite different.
So far from thinking that the contest could be settled without
one or more battles, the British admirals, though nominally
blockading his ports, gave the enemy every facility for coming out
in order that they might be able to bring him to action. Napoleon,
on the contrary, declared that a battle would be useless, and
distinctly ordered his officers not to fight one. Could it be
that, when pitted against admirals whose accurate conception of
the conditions of naval warfare had been over and over again tested
during the hostilities ended by the Peace of Amiens, Napoleon still
trusted to the efficacy of methods which had proved so successful
when he was outmanoeuvring and intimidating the generals who
opposed him in North Italy? We can only explain his attitude
in the campaign of Trafalgar by attributing to him an expectation
that the British seamen of his day, tried as they had been in
the fire of many years of war, would succumb to his methods as
readily as the military formalists of central Europe.

Napoleon had at his disposal between seventy and eighty French,
Dutch, and Spanish ships of the line, of which some sixty-seven
were available at the beginning of the Trafalgar campaign. In
January 1805, besides other ships of the class in distant waters
or specially employed, we--on our side--had eighty ships of the
line in commission. A knowledge of this will enable us to form
some idea of the chan