ide these ports, waiting for the other half to
get afloat. Then there remained forty miles of sea to cross. And what
would happen if, say, Nelson and Collingwood, with a dozen 74-gun
ships, got at work amongst the flotilla? It would be a combat between
wolves and sheep. It was Nelson's chief aspiration to have the
opportunity of "trying Napoleon on a wind," and the attempt to cross
the Straits might have given him that chance. All Napoleon's resources
and genius were therefore strained to give him for the briefest
possible time the command of the Channel; and the skill and energy of
the British navy were taxed to the utmost to prevent that consummation.

Now, France, as a matter of fact, had a great fleet, but it was
scattered, and lying imprisoned, in fragments, in widely separated
ports. There were twelve ships of the line in Toulon, twenty in Brest,
five in Rochefort, yet other five in Ferrol; and the problem for
Napoleon was, somehow, to set these imprisoned squadrons free, and
assemble them for twenty-four hours off Boulogne. The British policy,
on the other hand, was to maintain a sleepless blockade of these ports,
and keep the French fleet sealed up in scattered and helpless
fragments. The battle for the Straits of Dover, the British naval
chiefs held, must be fought off Brest and Ferrol and Toulon; and never
in the history of the world were blockades so vigilant, and stern, and
sleepless maintained.

Nelson spent two years battling with the fierce north-westers of the
Gulf of Lyons, keeping watch over a great French squadron in Toulon,
and from May 1803 to August 1805 left his ship only three times, and
for less than an hour on each occasion. The watch kept by Cornwallis
off Brest, through summer and winter, for nearly three years, Mahan
declares, has never, for constancy and vigilance, been excelled,
perhaps never equalled, in the history of blockades. The hardship of
these long sea-watches was terrible. It was waging an fight with
weariness and brain-paralysing monotony, with cold and scurvy and
tempest, as well as with human foes. Collingwood was once twenty-two
months at sea without dropping anchor. In seventeen years of sea
service--between 1793 and 1810--he was only twelve months in England.

The wonder is that the seamen of that day did not grow web-footed, or
forget what solid ground felt like! Collingwood tells his wife in one
letter that he had "not seen a green leaf on a tree" for four