which, as for most mistakes, a penalty had in the end to be paid; and in fact, if the relief of Calvi was the object of the sortie, the place to fight was evidently as far from there as possible.  Off Toulon, even had Hotham been beaten, his opponents would have been too roughly handled to carry out their mission.  As it was, this precipitate retirement lost the British an opportunity for a combat that might have placed their control of the sea beyond peradventure; and a few months later, Nelson, who at first had viewed Hotham’s action with the generous sympathy and confident pride which always characterized his attitude towards his brother officers, showed how clearly he was reading in the book of experience the lessons that should afterwards stand himself in good stead.  “When ‘Victory’ is gone,” he wrote, “we shall be thirteen sail of the line [to the French fifteen], when the enemy will keep our new Commanding Officer [Hotham] in hot water, who missed, unfortunately, the opportunity of fighting them, last June.”  Ten years later, in his celebrated chase of Villeneuve’s fleet, he said to his captains:  “If we meet the enemy we shall find them not less than eighteen, I rather think twenty, sail of the line, and therefore do not be surprised if I should not fall on them immediately [he had but eleven]—­we won’t part[23] without a battle;” and he expressed with the utmost decision his clear appreciation that even a lost battle, if delivered at the right point or at the right moment, would frustrate the ulterior objects of the enemy, by crippling the force upon which they depended.  As will be seen in the sequel, Hotham, throughout his brief command as Hood’s successor, suffered the consequences of permitting so important a fraction of the enemy’s fleet to escape his grasp, when it was in his power to close with it.

The British divisions met off the threatened port two days after leaving Bastia, and two hours later a lookout frigate brought word that the French fleet had been seen by her the evening before, to the northward and westward, some forty miles off its own coast.  Hood at once made sail in pursuit, and in the afternoon of the 10th of June caught sight of the enemy, but so close in with the shore that they succeeded in towing their ships under the protection of the batteries in Golfe Jouan, where, for lack of wind, he was unable to follow them for some days, during which they had time to strengthen their position beyond his powers of offence.  Hotham’s error was irreparable.  The “Agamemnon” was then sent back to Bastia, to resume the work of transportation, which Nelson pushed with the untiring energy that characterized all his movements.  Arriving on the 12th, fifteen hundred troops were embarked by eight the next morning, and at four in the afternoon he sailed, having with him two smaller ships of war and twenty-two transports.  On the 15th he anchored at San Fiorenzo.