Nelson, however, did not as yet at all realize the wideness of the impending struggle, for it was in these very letters that he expressed a wish to exchange to the West Indies.  “You know,” he writes to his old friend Locker, “that Pole is gone to the West Indies.  I have not seen him since his order, but I know it was a thing he dreaded.  Had I been at Toulon I should have been a candidate for that service, for I think our sea war is over in these seas.”  Perhaps his intrinsic merit would have retrieved even such a mistake as we can now see this would have been, and he would there have come sooner into contact with Sir John Jervis—­to whom, if to any one, the name of patron to Nelson may be applied—­for Jervis then had the West India command; but it is difficult to imagine Nelson’s career apart from the incidents of his Mediterranean service.  The Mediterranean seems inseparable from his name, and he in the end felt himself identified with it beyond all other waters.

His longing for action, which prompted the desire for the West Indies, was quickly gratified, for orders were received from Hood, by Linzee, to detach him from the latter’s command.  The admiral sent him a very handsome letter upon his single-handed combat with the French frigates, and directed him to go to the north end of Corsica, to take charge of a division of vessels he would there find cruising, and to search for his late enemies along that coast and through the neighboring waters, between the island and the shores of Italy.  He was also to warn off neutral vessels bound to Genoa, that port being declared blockaded, and to seize them if they persisted in their voyage thither.  “I consider this command as a very high compliment,” wrote Nelson to his uncle Suckling, “there being five older captains in the fleet.”  This it certainly was,—­a compliment and a prophecy as well.

In pursuance of these orders Nelson left Tunis on the 30th of November, and on the 8th of December discovered the French squadron, protected by shore batteries, in San Fiorenzo Bay, in Corsica.  This island, which during the middle ages, and until some twenty years before the beginning of the French Revolution, was a dependency of Genoa, had then by the latter been ceded to France, against the express wishes of the inhabitants, whose resistance was crushed only after a prolonged struggle.  Although it was now in open revolt against the Revolutionary government, the troops of the latter still held three or four of the principal seaports, among them the northern one in which the frigates then lay, as well as Bastia upon the east coast of the island, and Calvi on the west.  His force being insufficient to engage the works of any of these places, there was nothing for Nelson to do but to blockade them, in hopes of exhausting their resources and at least preventing the escape of the ships of war.  In this he was successful, for the latter either were destroyed or fell into the hands of Great Britain, when the ports were reduced.