ith the Queen. Nelson consented, took on
board seventeen hundred troops, with the Hereditary Prince, who was to
represent the King,--the latter not wishing to go,--and was already
clear of Palermo Bay when the two ships from Keith appeared. Gathering
from their information that the French were bound for Naples or
Sicily, in which his own judgment coincided, he returned at once into
port, landed the Prince and the troops, and then took the squadron
again off Maritimo, where he expected Ball and the two ships off Malta
to join him without delay. "The French force being twenty-two sail of
the line," he wrote in suppressed reproach to Keith, "four of which
are first rates, the force with me being only sixteen of the line, not
one of which was of three decks, three being Portuguese, and one of
the English being a sixty-four, very short of men, I had no choice
left but to return to Palermo."

With this incident of the insufficient reinforcement sent, began the
friction with Keith which appears more openly in his correspondence
with others. To St. Vincent, still commander-in-chief, he wrote: "I
send a copy of my letter to Lord Keith, and I have only stated my
regret that his Lordship could not have sent me a force fit to face
the enemy: but, as we are, I shall not get out of their way; although,
as I am, I cannot think myself justified in exposing the world (I may
almost say) to be plundered by these miscreants. I trust your Lordship
will not think me wrong in the painful determination I conceived
myself forced to make," that is, to go back to Palermo, "for agonized
indeed was the mind of your Lordship's faithful and affectionate
servant."

Nelson appears to have felt that the return to Palermo, though
imperative, in view of the relative forces of himself and the French,
would not only postpone and imperil the restoration of the royal
family, but would bring discredit upon himself for not seeking and
fighting the enemy's fleet. "I shall wait off Maritimo," he wrote
Keith, "anxiously expecting such a reinforcement as may enable me to
go in search of the enemy's fleet, when not one moment shall be lost
in bringing them to battle; for," he continues, with one of those
flashes of genius which from time to time, unconsciously to himself,
illuminate his writings, "I consider the best defence for his Sicilian
Majesty's dominions is to place myself alongside the French." "My
situation is a cruel one," he wrote to Hamilton, "and I am