on the 7th, the “Orion” and “Alexander” were not in sight.  The French having so long a start, and there being now with him eleven seventy-fours, Nelson with characteristic promptness would not delay an instant.  The fifty-gun ship “Leander,” which had come with Troubridge, was directed to wait forty-eight hours for the two absentees, with a memorandum of the course about to be followed.  Confident that single ships would be able to overtake a squadron whose route they knew, the admiral at once pushed on for Cape Corso, the north point of Corsica, intending to pass between the island and Italy, seeking information as he went.  The “Mutine” was all he had to replace the missing frigates.

June 7th thus marks the beginning of a chase, which ended only upon the 1st of August in the Battle of the Nile.  During this miserable period of suspense and embarrassment, occasioned and prolonged beyond all reason or necessity by the want of lookout ships, the connecting and illuminating thread is the purpose of Nelson, at once clear and firm, to find the French fleet and to fight it the instant found.  No other consideration draws his mind aside, except so far as it may facilitate the attainment and fulfilment of this one object.  In this one light he sees all things.  At the start he writes to St. Vincent:  “You may be assured I will fight them the moment I can reach, be they at anchor or under sail.”  Three days later, he tells Sir William Hamilton:  “If their fleet is not moored in as strong a port as Toulon, nothing shall hinder me from attacking them.”  “Be they bound to the Antipodes,” he says to Earl Spencer, “your Lordship may rely that I will not lose a moment in bringing them to action, and endeavour to destroy their transports.”  Such expressions are repeated with a frequency which proves the absolute hold the resolution had upon his mind.  When obstacles occur to him, or are mentioned, they do not make room for the thought of not fighting to be entertained; only Toulon suggests the idea of impossibility.  He raises difficulties diligently enough, but it is only that they may be the better overcome, not that they may deter.  All possible conditions are considered and discussed, but simply in order that the best fighting solution may be reached.  The constant mental attitude is such that the man is unprepared to recede before any opposition; he fortifies his mind beforehand with the best means of meeting and vanquishing it, but the attempt at least shall be made.  “Thank God,” he wrote at this moment, “I do not feel difficulties;” yet the avowal itself accompanies so plain a statement of his embarrassments as to show that his meaning is that they do not discourage.  This characteristic appeared most strongly at Copenhagen, partly because the difficulties there were greatest, partly from the close contrast with a man of very different temper.