It was not till near the end of April that the “Agamemnon” finally left the Thames, anchoring at Spithead on the 28th of that month.  Still the fleet which Lord Hood was to command was not ready.  While awaiting her consorts, the ship made a short cruise in the Channel, and a few days later sailed as one of a division of five ships-of-the-line under Admiral Hotham, to occupy a station fifty to a hundred miles west of the Channel Islands.  Nelson’s disposition not to form any opinion of his own respecting the propriety of orders was thus evidenced:  “What we have been sent out for is best known to the great folks in London:  to us, it appears, only to hum the nation and make tools of us, for where we have been stationed no enemy was likely to be met with, or where we could protect our own trade.”  There can be no doubt that not only was the practical management of the Navy at this time exceedingly bad, but that no sound ideas even prevailed upon the subject.  Hotham’s squadron gained from neutral vessels two important pieces of information,—­that Nantes, Bordeaux, and L’Orient were filled with English vessels, prizes to French cruisers; and that the enemy kept eight sail-of-the-line, with frigates in proportion, constantly moving in detachments about the Bay of Biscay.  Under the dispositions adopted by the British Admiralty, these hostile divisions gave, to the commerce destroying of the smaller depredators, a support that sufficiently accounts for the notorious sufferings of British trade during the opening years of the war.  Nelson had no mastery of the terminology of warfare,—­he never talked about strategy and little about tactics,—­but, though without those valuable aids to precision of thought, he had pondered, studied, and reasoned, and he had, besides, what is given to few,—­real genius and insight.  Accordingly he at once pierced to the root of the trouble,—­the enemy’s squadrons, rather than the petty cruisers dependent upon them, to which the damage was commonly attributed.  “They are always at sea, and England not willing to send a squadron to interrupt them.”  But, while instancing this intuitive perception of a man gifted with rare penetration, it is necessary to guard against rash conclusions that might be drawn from it, and to remark that it by no means follows that education is unnecessary to the common run of men, because a genius is in advance of his times.  It is well also to note that even in him this flash of insight, though unerring in its indications, lacked the definiteness of conviction which results from ordered thought.  However accurate, it is but a glimmer,—­not yet a fixed light.