uncontrolled direction of the naval part,” were his own words,—­and sleep quietly.  Despite his objections to the island itself, and his enthusiastic fidelity to the Neapolitan royal house, Nelson had evidently the presentiment that Malta must come to Great Britain, a solution which Ball and the Maltese themselves were urging upon him.  “A Neapolitan garrison would betray it to the first man who would bribe him,” he wrote; which, if true, left to Great Britain no other alternative than to take it herself.  Neither he, Troubridge, nor the sovereigns, had confidence in the fidelity of Neapolitan officers.

The blockade of Malta was maintained with great tenacity, and, coupled with the maritime prostration of France in the Mediterranean, resulted in a complete isolation of the French garrison in La Valetta by sea, the Maltese people hemming it in by land.  By the 1st of May Ball had erected a battery at the head of the harbor, sweeping it to the entrance, so that the French ships, one of which was the “Guillaume Tell,” eighty, that had escaped from Aboukir, had to be kept in the coves.  These affairs of Malta brought Nelson into difficult diplomatic relations with the Barbary States, Tunis and Tripoli.  The island not affording sufficient food, strenuous efforts had to be made by him and Ball to get grain from Sicily and elsewhere, a matter very difficult of accomplishment even were the transit unmolested; but these petty Mussulman states, for the purposes of piracy, kept themselves in formal war with Naples and Portugal, and frequently captured vessels under the Sicilian flag carrying corn to Malta.  The British had too much on hand now to spare readily the force necessary to put down these depredators, at whose misdeeds they had winked in quieter days; and it required all Nelson’s tact, combining threats with compliments, and with appeals to the prejudices of believers in God against those who denied Him, to keep the marauding within bounds.  The irrepressible activity of Bonaparte’s emissaries also stirred the Beys up to measures friendly to France.  “The infamous conduct of the French during the whole war, has at last called down the vengeance of all true Mussulmen,” he writes to the Bey of Tunis; “and your Highness, I am sure, will agree with me that Divine Providence will never permit these infidels to God to go unpunished.  The conduct of your Highness reflects upon you the very highest honour.  Although I have a squadron of Portuguese ships under my orders, I have prevented their cruizing against the vessels of war of your Highness.  For at this moment all wars should cease, and all the world should join in endeavouring to extirpate from off the face of the earth this race of murderers, oppressors, and unbelievers.”