Port Mahon, the frigates next went to Cartagena, and ascertained that the great Spanish fleet was certainly not there.  As Toulon also had been found empty, it seemed clear that it had gone to the westward, the more so as the most probable information indicated that the naval enterprises of the French and their allies at that time were to be outside of the Mediterranean.  Nelson therefore pushed ahead, and on the 9th of February the “Minerve” and “Romulus” anchored in Gibraltar.  All three divisions from Elba passed the Straits within the same forty-eight hours.

The Spanish grand fleet had been seen from the Rock, four days before, standing to the westward into the Atlantic.  Two ships-of-the-line and a frigate had been detached from it, with supplies for the Spanish lines before Gibraltar, and had anchored at the head of the bay, where they still were when Nelson arrived.  On board them had also been sent the two British lieutenants and the seamen, who became prisoners when the “Sabina” was recaptured.  Their exchange was effected, for which alone Nelson was willing to wait.  The fact that the Spanish fleet had gone towards Jervis’s rendezvous, and the continuance of easterly winds, which would tend to drive them still farther in the same direction, gave him uneasy premonitions of that coming battle which it would “break his heart” to miss.  It was, besides, part of his ingrained military philosophy, never absent from his careful mind, that a fair wind may fall or shift.  “The object of a sea-officer is to embrace the happy moment which now and then offers,—­it may be to-day, it may be never.”  Regretting at this moment the loss even of a tide, entailed by the engagements of the Viceroy, whom he had to carry to Jervis, and therefore could not leave, he wrote, “I fear a westerly wind.”  The Providence in which he so often expresses his reliance, now as on many other occasions, did not forsake the favored son, who never by sluggishness or presumption lost his opportunities.  The wind held fair until the 13th of February, when Nelson rejoined the commander-in-chief.  That night it shifted to the westward, and the following day was fought the Battle of Cape St. Vincent.

Taken in its entirety, the episode of this nearly forgotten mission to Elba is singularly characteristic, not only of Nelson’s own qualities, but also of those concurrences which, whatever the origin attributed to them by this or that person, impress upon a man’s career the stamp of “fortunate.”  An errand purely of evasion, not in itself of prime importance, but for an object essentially secondary, it results in a night combat of unusual brilliancy, which would probably not have been fought at all could the British have seen the overwhelming force ready to descend upon conqueror and conquered alike.  With every spar wounded, and a hostile fleet in sight, the “Minerve” nevertheless makes good her retreat.  Solitary, in an enemy’s sea, she roams it with premeditated deliberateness, escaping