efforts for fresh food, and he mentions hectic
complaints--"of the few men we have lost, nine in ten are dead of
consumption "--but upon the whole, the general condition is
unparalleled in his experience. "We are healthy beyond example, and in
great good humour with ourselves," he writes in October, 1803, "and so
sharp-set, that I would not be a French Admiral in the way of any of
our ships for something." It would be tedious to quote the numerous
assertions to the same effect scattered up and down his correspondence
at this time; but in December, 1804, when near the end of this long
period of suspense, and after eighteen months at sea, he writes to the
Admiralty: "The Fleet is in perfect good health and good humour,
unequalled by anything which has ever come within my knowledge, and
equal to the most active service which the times may call for." Dr.
Gillespie, who joined the "Victory" as physician to the fleet in
January, 1805, wrote immediately afterwards that out of her eight
hundred and forty men, but one was confined to his bed by sickness,
and that the other ships, though upwards of twenty months off Toulon,
were in a like condition of health.

The same could not then, nor for long before, be said of Nelson
himself. The first flush of excitement in leaving England and taking
command, the expectation and change of scene in going out, affected
him favorably. "As to my health," he says, immediately after joining
the fleet, "thank God, I have not had a finger ache since I left
England;" but this, unfortunately, did not endure. It was his first
experience of the weightier anxieties of a commander-in-chief; for
when he had succeeded to that position, temporarily, in the
Mediterranean and the Baltic, he had found either a squadron in good
running order, or at the least no serious hitch about necessary
maintenance. Now all this was different. The difficulties about
supplies and the condition of his ships have been mentioned, as have
also his fears for Naples, Sicily, and the Morea,--all of which, in
his belief, might possibly be conquered, even without the
interposition of the Toulon fleet. The latter, however, kept him most
uneasy; for he could get no certain knowledge as to its destination,
or the probable time of its moving; and the wide field for injury open
to it, if his vigilance were eluded, kept his eager, unquiet mind
continually on the strain of speculation and anticipation. "I hope
they will come out and let