f the British admiral in the West Indies was neither light nor
simple.

In Europe, the safety of England herself and of Gibraltar was gravely
imperilled by the absence of these large detachments in the Western
Hemisphere, to which may also be attributed the loss of Minorca. When
sixty-six allied ships-of-the-line confronted the thirty-five which
alone England could collect, and drove them into their harbors, there
was realized that mastery of the Channel which Napoleon claimed would
make him beyond all doubt master of England. For thirty days, the
thirty ships which formed the French contingent had cruised in the Bay
of Biscay, awaiting the arrival of the tardy Spaniards; but they were
not disturbed by the English fleet. Gibraltar was more than once
brought within sight of starvation, through the failure of
communications with England; and its deliverance was due, not to the
power of the English navy suitably disposed by its government, but to
the skill of British officers and the inefficiency of the Spaniards.
In the great final relief, Lord Howe's fleet numbered only thirty-four
to the allied forty-nine.

Which, then, in the difficulties under which England labored, was the
better course,--to allow the enemy free exit from his ports and
endeavor to meet him by maintaining a sufficient naval force on each
of the exposed stations, or to attempt to watch his arsenals at home,
under all the difficulties of the situation, not with the vain hope of
preventing every raid, or intercepting every convoy, but with the
expectation of frustrating the greater combinations, and of following
close at the heels of any large fleet that escaped? Such a watch must
not be confounded with a blockade, a term frequently, but not quite
accurately, applied to it. "I beg to inform your Lordship," wrote
Nelson, "that the port of Toulon has never been blockaded by me; quite
the reverse. Every opportunity has been offered the enemy to put to
sea, for it is there we hope to realize the hopes and expectations of
our country." "Nothing," he says again, "ever kept the French fleet in
Toulon or Brest when they had a mind to come out;" and although the
statement is somewhat exaggerated, it is true that the attempt to shut
them up in port would have been hopeless. What Nelson expected by
keeping near their ports, with enough lookout ships properly
distributed, was to know when they sailed and what direction they
took, intending, to use his own expressi