Hotham’s division joined the main body under Lord Hood, off the Scilly Islands, on the 23d of May, the total force then consisting of eleven sail-of-the-line, with the usual smaller vessels.  It remained cruising in that neighborhood until the 6th of June, keeping the approaches of the Channel open for a homeward-bound convoy of merchantmen, which passed on that day.  The fleet then bore up for the Straits, and on the 14th six ships, the “Agamemnon” among them, parted company for Cadiz, there to fill up with water, in order to avoid the delays which would arise if the scanty resources of Gibraltar had to supply all the vessels.  On the 23d this division left Cadiz, reaching Gibraltar the same evening; and on the 27th Hood, having now with him fifteen of the line, sailed for Toulon.

Nelson’s mind was already busy with the prospects of the campaign, and the various naval factors that went to make up the military situation.  “Time must discover what we are going after,” he writes to his brother; while to Locker he propounds the problem which always has perplexed the British mind, and still does,—­how to make the French fight, if they are unwilling.  So long as that question remains unsolved, the British government has to bear the uncertainties, exposure, and expense of a difficult and protracted defensive.  “We have done nothing,” he says, “and the same prospect appears before us:  the French cannot come out, and we have no means of getting at them in Toulon.”  In “cannot come out,” he alludes to the presence of a Spanish fleet of twenty-four ships-of-the-line.  This, in conjunction with Hood’s force, would far exceed the French in Toulon, which the highest estimate then placed at twenty-one of the line.  He had, however, already measured the capabilities of the Spanish Navy.  They have very fine ships, he admits, but they are shockingly manned,—­so much so that if only the barges’ crews of the six British vessels that entered Cadiz, numbering at the most seventy-five to a hundred men, but all picked, could have got on board one of their first-rates, he was certain they could have captured her, although her ship’s company numbered nearly a thousand.  “If those we are to meet in the Mediterranean are no better manned,” he continues, “much service cannot be expected of them.”  The prediction proved true, for no sooner did Hood find the Spanish admiral than the latter informed him he must go to Cartagena, having nineteen hundred sick in his fleet.  The officer who brought this message said it was no wonder they were sickly, for they had been sixty days at sea.  This excited Nelson’s derision—­not unjustly.  “From the circumstance of having been longer than that time at sea, do we attribute our getting healthy.  It has stamped with me the extent of their nautical abilities:  long may they remain in their present state.”  The last sentence reveals his intuitive appreciation of the fact that the Spain of that day could in no true sense be the ally of Great Britain; for, at the moment he penned the wish, the impotence or defection of their allies would leave the British fleet actually inferior to the enemy in those waters.  He never forgot these impressions, nor the bungling efforts of the Spaniards to form a line of battle.  Up to the end of his life the prospect of a Spanish war involved no military anxieties, but only the prospect of more prize money.