After the addition of the Spanish Navy to his own, Napoleon to some extent modified his strategic arrangements.  The essential feature of the scheme remained unaltered.  It was to effect the junction of the different parts of his naval force and thereupon to dominate the situation, by evading the several British fleets or detachments which were watching his.  Before Spain joined him in the war his intention was that his escaping fleets should go out into the Atlantic, behind the backs, as it were, of the British ships, and then make for the English Channel.  When he had the aid of Spain the point of junction was to be in the West Indies.

The remarkable thing about this was the evident belief that the command of the sea might be won without fighting for it; won, too, from the British Navy which was ready, and indeed wished, to fight.  We now see that Napoleon’s naval strategy at the time of Trafalgar, whilst it aimed at gaining command of the sea, was based on what has been called evasion.  The fundamental principle of the British naval strategy of that time was quite different.  So far from thinking that the contest could be settled without one or more battles, the British admirals, though nominally blockading his ports, gave the enemy every facility for coming out in order that they might be able to bring him to action.  Napoleon, on the contrary, declared that a battle would be useless, and distinctly ordered his officers not to fight one.  Could it be that, when pitted against admirals whose accurate conception of the conditions of naval warfare had been over and over again tested during the hostilities ended by the Peace of Amiens, Napoleon still trusted to the efficacy of methods which had proved so successful when he was outmanoeuvring and intimidating the generals who opposed him in North Italy?  We can only explain his attitude in the campaign of Trafalgar by attributing to him an expectation that the British seamen of his day, tried as they had been in the fire of many years of war, would succumb to his methods as readily as the military formalists of central Europe.

Napoleon had at his disposal between seventy and eighty French, Dutch, and Spanish ships of the line, of which some sixty-seven were available at the beginning of the Trafalgar campaign.  In January 1805, besides other ships of the class in distant waters or specially employed, we—­on our side—­had eighty ships of the line in commission.  A knowledge of this will enable us to form some idea of the chances of success that would have attended Napoleon’s concentration if it had been effected.  To protect the passage of his invading expedition across the English Channel he did not depend only on concentrating his more distant fleets.  In the Texel there were, besides smaller vessels, nine sail of the line.  Thus the Emperor did what we may be sure any future intending invader will not fail to do, viz. he provided his expedition with a respectable naval escort.  The British naval officers of the day, who knew what war was, made arrangements to deal with this escort.  Lord Keith, who commanded in the Downs, had under him six sail of the line in addition to many frigates and sloops; and there were five more line-of-battle ships ready at Spithead if required.