which had doubtless come down with Jervis.  “She is little better than a wreck,” he wrote to a friend; but the cripples had to be kept to the front, pending the arrival of fresh ships.  Besides her, he had the “Colossus,” seventy-four, and “Leander,” fifty, with a suitable number of smaller cruisers.  Passing within gunshot of Port Mahon in Minorca, he heard from several passing vessels that a French squadron of four ships-of-the-line was at sea, as he had anticipated; and these, he afterwards learned, were seen off Minorca only twenty-two hours before he passed.  Fortunately a fresh northwest gale had carried them to the southward, and on the 21st of April, sixty miles west of Corsica, he joined the convoy, which carried over three thousand soldiers.  He reached Gibraltar with it in safety in the early days of May, without adventures of any kind.  “I observed a man-of-war brig evidently looking at us; but my charge was too important to separate one ship in chase of her, especially as three frigates had parted company; for until this garrison is safe down, I do not think our business is well finished.”  Its arrival completed the evacuation of the Mediterranean.

At Gibraltar several days were spent, evidently crowded with administrative details concerning the coming and going of convoys, for there is here an almost total cessation of Nelson’s usually copious letter-writing.  An interesting and instructive incident is, however, made known to us by one of the three letters dated during these ten days.  The Consul of the United States of America had to apply to him for the protection of twelve American merchant ships, then at Malaga, against the probable depredations of French privateers lying in that port, which, under the edicts of the government of the French Republic, with whom the United States was at peace, were expected to overhaul and capture them when they sailed.  Nelson at once complied, ordering a British frigate to go to Malaga and escort the vessels to the Barbary coast, and even out of the Straits, if necessary.  In doing this, he wrote courteously to the Consul:  “I am sure of fulfilling the wishes of my Sovereign, and I hope of strengthening the harmony which at present so happily subsists between the two nations.”

On the 24th of May Nelson rejoined the admiral off Cadiz, and on the 27th shifted his own flag into the “Theseus.”  The day before he left the fleet, April 11th, Jervis had decided to institute a strict commercial blockade of Cadiz, with the object of distressing Spanish trade, preventing the entrance of supplies, upon which depended the operations of Spain against Portugal, as well as her naval preparations, and so forcing the Spanish fleet out to fight, in order to rid itself of such embarrassment.  Nelson, as commander of the inshore squadron, had then issued the necessary notices to neutrals in the port, and to this charge he now returned.  Under Jervis’s intelligent partiality, he, the junior flag-officer,