methods, and seem to have received the tacit support, if not the direct sympathy, of the Navy Board, as the Civil Department was then called.  His disposition to look into matters, however, had become known, and the long struggle over the contraband trade had given him in the islands a reputation for tenacity and success.  It was probably in dependence upon these that two merchants came to him, two months before he left the station, and told him of the existence of very extensive frauds, dating back several years, in which were implicated both civil officials of the Navy and private parties on shore.  It is possible that the informants themselves had shared in some of these transactions, and they certainly demanded in payment a part of the sums recovered; but, as Nelson truly said, the question was not as to their character, but how to stop the continuance of embezzlements which had then amounted to over two millions sterling.

The reports made by him upon this subject reached London about a month before the return of the “Boreas;” but the war scare, and the urgent call upon all departments of the Navy to mobilize the available force, prevented any immediate steps being taken.  His letters were acknowledged, and the intention expressed to investigate the matter, but nothing more was then done.  October, however, the Prussian troops occupied Amsterdam, reinstating the Stadtholder in all his privileges, and restoring to power the partisans of Great Britain; while France remained passive, her power for external action paralyzed by the dying convulsions of the monarchy.  The curtain had just risen upon the opening scene in the great drama of the Revolution,—­the first Assembly of Notables.  Warlike preparations consequently ceased, and on the 30th of November, 1787, the cruise of the “Boreas” came to an end.

It was during this last month of servitude, and immediately before quitting the ship, that Nelson is said to have used the vehement expressions of discontent with “an ungrateful service,” recorded by his biographers, concluding with his resolve to go at once to London and resign his commission.  In the absence of the faintest trace, in his letters, of dissatisfaction with the duty to which the ship was assigned, it is reasonable to attribute this exasperation to his soreness under the numerous reprimands he had received,—­a feeling which plainly transpires in some of his replies, despite the forms of official respect that he scrupulously observed.  Even in much later days, when his distinguished reputation might have enabled him to sustain with indifference this supercilious rudeness, he winced under it with over-sensitiveness.  “Do not, my dear lord,” he wrote to Earl Spencer a year after the battle of the Nile, “let the Admiralty write harshly to me—­my generous soul cannot bear it, being conscious it is entirely unmerited.”  This freedom of censure, often felt by him to be undeserved, or at least excessive, and its sharp contrast with