About this time he must have felt some touch of sympathy for the effeminate Spaniards, who were made ill by a sixty days’ cruise.  “All we get here,” he writes, “is honour and salt beef.  My poor fellows have not had a morsel of fresh meat or vegetables for near nineteen weeks; and in that time I have only had my foot twice on shore at Cadiz.  We are absolutely getting sick from fatigue.”  “I am here [Naples] with news of our most glorious and great success, but, alas! the fatigue of getting it has been so great that the fleet generally, and I am sorry to say, my ship most so, are knocked up.  Day after day, week after week, month after month, we have not been two gun shots from Toulon.”  The evident looseness of this statement, for the ship had only been a little over a month off Toulon, shows the impression the service had made upon his mind, for he was not prone to such exaggerations.  “It is hardly possible,” he says again, “to conceive the state of my ship; I have little less than one hundred sick.”  This condition of things is an eloquent testimony to the hardships endured; for Nelson was singularly successful, both before and after these days, in maintaining the health of a ship’s company.  His biographers say that during the term of three years that he commanded the “Boreas” in the West Indies, not a single officer or man died out of her whole complement,—­an achievement almost incredible in that sickly climate;[19] and he himself records that in his two months’ chase of Villeneuve, in 1805, no death from sickness occurred among the seven or eight thousand persons in the fleet.  He attributed these remarkable results to his attention, not merely to the physical surroundings of the crews, but also to the constant mental stimulus and interest, which he aroused by providing the seamen with occupation, frequent amusements, and change of scene, thus keeping the various faculties in continual play, and avoiding the monotony which most saps health, through its deadening influence on the mind and spirits.

The “Agamemnon” reached Naples on the 12th of September, and remained there four days.  Nelson pressed the matter of reinforcements with such diligence, and was so heartily sustained by the British minister, Sir William Hamilton, that he obtained the promise of six thousand troops to sail at once under the convoy of the “Agamemnon.”  “I have acted for Lord Hood,” he wrote, “with a zeal which no one could exceed;” and a few weeks later he says:  “The Lord is very much pleased with my conduct about the troops at Naples, which I undertook without any authority whatever from him; and they arrived at Toulon before his requisition reached Naples.”  It appears, therefore, that his orders were rather those of a despatch-bearer than of a negotiator; but that he, with the quick initiative he always displayed, took upon himself diplomatic action, to further the known wishes of his superior and the common cause of England and Naples.  It was upon this occasion that Nelson first met Lady