When an attack is likely to be made by an enemy’s squadron, by forcing the fleet from to-leeward, Signal 109 will be made with a blue pennant where best seen;[4] upon which each ship will luff up upon the weather quarter of her second ahead, so as to leave no opening for the leading ship of the enemy to pass through:  this movement will expose them to the collected fire of all that part of the fleet they intended to force.[5]

It has been often remarked that Nelson founded no school of tactics, and the instructions which were issued with the new Signal Book immediately after the war entirely endorse the remark.  They can be called nothing else but reactionary.  Nelson’s drastic attempt to break up the old rigid formation into active divisions independently commanded seems to have come to nothing, and the new instructions are based with almost all the old pedantry on the single line of battle.  Of anything like mutually supporting movements there is only a single trace.  It is in Article XIV., and that is only a resurrection of the time-honoured corps de reserve, formed of superfluous ships after your line has been equalised with that of a numerically inferior enemy.  The whole document, in fact, is a consecration of the fetters which had been forged in the worst days of the seventeenth century, and which Nelson had so resolutely set himself to break.

The new Signal Book in which the instructions appear was founded on the code elaborated by Sir Home Riggs Popham, but there is nothing to show whether or not he was the author of the instructions.  He was an officer of high scientific attainments, but although he had won considerable distinction during the war, his service had been entirely of an amphibious character in connection with military operations ashore, and he had never seen a fleet action at sea.  He reached flag rank in 1814, and was one of the men who received a K.C.B. on the reconstitution of the order in 1815.  Of the naval lords serving with Lord Melville at the time none can show a career or a reputation which would lead us to expect from them anything but the colourless instructions they produced.  The controlling influence was undoubtedly Lord Keith.  The doyen of the active list, and in command of the Channel Fleet till he retired after the peace of 1815, he was all-powerful as a naval authority, and his flag captain, Sir Graham Moore, had just been given a seat on the board.  A devout pupil of St. Vincent and Howe, correct rather than brilliant, Keith represented the old tradition, and notwithstanding the patience with which he had borne Nelson’s vagaries and insubordination, the antipathy between the two men was never disguised.  However generously Keith appreciated Nelson’s genius, he can only have regarded his methods as an evil influence in the service for ordinary men, nor can there be much doubt that his apprehensions had a good deal to justify them.