“The credit I derive from all these compliments,” he wrote to his wife, “must be satisfactory to you; and, should I remain until peace, which cannot be very long, you will, I sincerely hope, make your mind easy.”  But more grateful than open flattery, to one so interested in, and proud of, his military activities, was the respect paid by Jervis to his views and suggestions relative to the approaching operations.  “He was so well satisfied with my opinion of what is likely to happen, and the means of prevention to be taken, that he had no reserve with me respecting his information and ideas of what is likely to be done;” or, as he wrote a month later, “he seems at present to consider me more as an associate than a subordinate officer; for I am acting without any orders.  This may have its difficulties at a future day; but I make none, knowing the uprightness of my intentions.  ’You must have a larger ship,’ continued the admiral, ’for we cannot spare you, either as captain or admiral.’” Such were the opening relations between these two distinguished officers, who were in the future to exert great influence upon each other’s career.

It is far from improbable that the ready coincidence of Jervis’s views with those of Nelson, as to future possibilities, arose, partly indeed from professional bias and prepossession as to the potency of navies, but still more from the false reports, of which Bonaparte was an apt promoter, and which a commission of the allies in Genoa greedily swallowed and transmitted.  The deterrent effect of their own fleet, “in being,” seems not to have prevented either of them from believing that the attempt upon Tuscany by sea was seriously intended.  True, Nelson does at times speak of the French as being so unreasonable that one may expect anything from them; but this scheme, which probably had not even a paper existence in France, was accepted by him as imminent, because he thought it suitable.  As he cogently remarked to Beaulieu, it is likely that your enemy will not do the thing which you wish him to do; and conversely, in this case, what to him appeared most threatening to his own cause was just what he expected to occur.  Jervis, sharing his views, and already knowing his man, despatched him again to the Gulf of Genoa, within forty-eight hours of his arrival in San Fiorenzo, somewhat to the disgust of the other captains, weary of being ever under the eye of an observant and exacting admiral.  “You did as you pleased in Lord Hood’s time,” said one grumbler, “the same in Admiral Hotham’s, and now again with Sir John Jervis; it makes no difference to you who is commander-in-chief.”  The tone of these words, which in the reading are almost flattering, is evident from Nelson’s comment:  “I returned a pretty strong answer to this speech.”