While the siege was in progress, Nelson received word of his appointment to a better ship, the “Janus,” of forty-four guns, and it became necessary for him to join her.  He left Fort San Juan only the day before it surrendered, and returned to Jamaica; but his health now gave way wholly, and his command of the “Janus,” for the most part merely nominal, soon came to an end altogether.  Dalling had truly said, “Captain Nelson’s constitution is rather too delicate for service in this northern ocean."[5] Before starting on the expedition, he had himself written to his friend Locker:  “If my health is not much better than it is at present, I shall certainly come home after this trip, as all the doctors are against my staying so long in this country.  You know my old complaint in my breast:  it is turned out to be the gout got there.  I have twice been given over since you left this country with that cursed disorder, the gout.”  In such weakness he lived and worked through a month of a short campaign, in which, of the “Hinchinbrook’s” crew of two hundred, one hundred and forty-five were buried in his time or that of his successor, Collingwood,—­a mortality which he justly cites as a further proof of the necessity for expedition in such climates.  But, though he survived, he escaped by the skin of his teeth.  Worn out by dysentery and fatigue, he was carried ashore in his cot, and soon after taken to Sir Peter Parker’s house, where Lady Parker herself nursed him through.  Her kindness to him and his own debility are touchingly shown by a note written from the mountains, where he was carried in his convalescence:  “Oh, Mr. Ross, what would I give to be at Port Royal!  Lady Parker not here, and the servants letting me lay as if a log, and take no notice.”  By September, 1780, it was apparent that perfect restoration, without change of climate, was impossible, and in the autumn, having been somewhat over three years on the station, he sailed for home in the “Lion,” of sixty-four guns, Captain Cornwallis,[6] to whose careful attention, as formerly to that of Captain Pigot, he gratefully attributed his life.  The expedition with which he had been associated ended in failure, for although a part of the force pushed on to Lake Nicaragua, sickness compelled the abandonment of the conquests, which were repossessed by the Spaniards.

Arriving in England, Nelson went to Bath, and there passed through a period of extreme suffering and tedious recovery.  “I have been so ill since I have been here,” says one of his letters, “that I was obliged to be carried to and from bed, with the most excruciating tortures.”  Exact dates are wanting; but he seems to have been under treatment near three months, when, on the 28th of January, 1781, he wrote to Locker, in his often uncouth style:  “Although I have not quite recovered the use of my limbs, yet my inside is a new man;” and again, three weeks later, “I have now the perfect use of all my limbs, except my left arm, which