he Malta convoy arrived, the whole started
together in charge of a division, composed usually of vessels of war
that had to return to England for repairs.

To arrange and maintain this complicated process, and to dovetail it
with the other necessary cruising duties, having in consideration
which ships should first go home, required careful study and long
foresight--infinite management, in fact. "The going on in the routine
of a station," he tells Ball, who seems to have trod on his toes, "if
interrupted, is like stopping a watch--the whole machine gets wrong.
If the Maidstone takes the convoy, and, when Agincourt arrives, there
is none for her or Thisbe, it puzzles me to know what orders to give
them. If they chace the convoy to Gibraltar, the Maidstone may have
gone on with it to England, and in that case, two ships, unless I
begin to give a new arrangement, will either go home without convoy,
or they must return [to Malta] in contradiction to the Admiralty's
orders to send them home; I am sure you see it in its true point of
view." "I dare not send a frigate home without a convoy," he says
later. "Not an officer in the service bows with more respect to the
orders of the Admiralty than myself," he writes St. Vincent; "but I am
sure you will agree with me, that if I form plans for the sending home
our convoys, and the clearing the different parts of the station from
privateers, and the other services requisite, and that the Admiralty
in some respects makes their arrangements, we must clash." Then he
points out how the Admiralty diverting a ship, unknown to him, has
tumbled over a whole train of services, like a child's row of blocks.

An extremely critical point in the homeward voyage was the first
hundred miles west of Gibraltar; and it was a greater thorn in
Nelson's side, because of a French seventy-four, the "Aigle," which
had succeeded in entering Cadiz just after he got off Toulon. For the
ordinary policing of that locality he assigned a division of three
frigates, under a Captain Gore, who possessed his confidence. "The
enemy's privateers and cruisers," he tells him, "are particularly
destructive to our trade passing the skirts of the station."
Privateering was thus reduced; but when a convoy sailed, he tried
always to have it accompanied through that stage by a ship of size
sufficient to grapple with the "Aigle." For a while, indeed, he placed
there an eighty-gun ship, but the gradual deterioration of his
squa