the panic.  Great merchant fleets were then on the sea, homeward bound.  If d’Orvilliers were gone to cruise in the approaches to the Channel, instead of to the Spanish coast, these might be taken; and for some time his whereabouts were unknown.  As it was, the Jamaica convoy, over two hundred sail, got in a few days before the allies appeared, and the Leeward Islands fleet had similar good fortune.  Eight homeward bound East Indiamen were less lucky, but, being warned of their danger, took refuge in the Shannon, and there remained till the trouble blew over.  On the other hand, the stock market stood firm.  Nevertheless, it was justly felt that such a state of things as a vastly superior hostile fleet in the Channel should not have been.  Sir John Jervis, afterward Earl St. Vincent, who commanded a ship in the fleet, wrote to his sister:  “What a humiliating state is our country reduced to!” but he added that he laughed at the idea of invasion.

The French had placed a force of fifty thousand men at Le Havre and St. Malo, and collected four hundred vessels for their transport.  Their plans were not certainly known, but enough had transpired to cause reasonable anxiety; and the crisis, on its face, was very serious.  Not their own preparations, but the inefficiency of their enemies, in counsel and in preparation, saved the British Islands from invasion.  What the results of this would have been is another question,—­a question of land warfare.  The original scheme of the French Ministry was to seize the Isle of Wight, securing Spithead as an anchorage for the fleet, and to prosecute their enterprise from this near and reasonably secure base.  Referring to this first project, d’Orvilliers wrote:  “We will seek the enemy at St. Helen’s,[70] and then, if I find that roadstead unoccupied, or make myself master of it, I will send word to Marshal De Vaux, at Le Havre, and inform him of the measures I will take to insure his passage, which [measures] will depend upon the position of the English main fleet [dependront des forces superieures des Anglais].  That is to say, I myself will lead the combined fleet on that side [against their main body], to contain the enemy, and I will send, on the other side [to convoy], a light squadron, with a sufficient number of ships of the line and frigates; or I will propose to M. de Cordova to take this latter station, in order that the passage of the army may be free and sure.  I assume that then, either by the engagement I shall have fought with the enemy, or by their retreat into their ports, I shall be certain of their situation and of the success of the operation."[71] It will be observed that d’Orvilliers, accounted then and now one of the best officers of his day in the French navy, takes here into full account the British “fleet in being.”  The main body of the allies, fifty ships, was to hold this in check, while a smaller force—­Cordova had command of a special “squadron of observation,” of sixteen ships of the line—­was to convoy the crossing.