Here he met General Stuart.  The latter was anxious to proceed at once with the siege of Calvi, but asked Nelson whether he thought it proper to take the shipping to that exposed position; alluding to the French fleet that had left Toulon, and which Hood was then seeking.  Nelson’s reply is interesting, as reflecting the judgment of a warrior at once prudent and enterprising, concerning the influence of a hostile “fleet in being” upon a contemplated detached operation.  “I certainly thought it right,” he said, “placing the firmest reliance that we should be perfectly safe under Lord Hood’s protection, who would take care that the French fleet at Gourjean[24] should not molest us.”  To Hood he wrote a week later:  “I believed ourselves safe under your Lordship’s wing.”  At this moment he thought the French to be nine sail-of-the-line to the British thirteen,—­no contemptible inferior force.  Yet that he recognized the possible danger from such a detachment is also clear; for, writing two days earlier, under the same belief as to the enemy’s strength, and speaking of the expected approach of an important convoy, he says:  “I hope they will not venture up till Lord Hood can get off Toulon, or wherever the French fleet are got to.”  When a particular opinion has received the extreme expression now given to that concerning the “fleet in being,” and apparently has undergone equally extreme misconception, it is instructive to recur to the actual effect of such a force, upon the practice of a man with whom moral effect was never in excess of the facts of the case, whose imagination produced to him no paralyzing picture of remote contingencies.  Is it probable that, with the great issues of 1690 at stake, Nelson, had he been in Tourville’s place, would have deemed the crossing of the Channel by French troops impossible, because of Torrington’s “fleet in being”?

Sailing again on June 16, the expedition arrived next day off Calvi.  Although it was now summer, the difficulties of the new undertaking were, from the maritime point of view, very great.  The town of Calvi, which was walled and had a citadel, lies upon a promontory on the west side of an open gulf of the same name, a semicircular recess, three miles wide by two deep, on the northwest coast of Corsica.  The western point of its shore line is Cape Revellata; the eastern, Point Espano.  The port being fortified and garrisoned, it was not practicable to take the shipping inside, nor to establish on the inner beach a safe base for disembarking.  The “Agamemnon” therefore anchored outside, nearly two miles south of Cape Revellata, and a mile from shore, in the excessive depth of fifty-three fathoms; the transports coming-to off the cape, but farther to seaward.  The water being so deep, and the bottom rocky, the position was perilous for sailing-ships, for the prevailing summer wind blows directly on the shore, which is steep-to and affords no shelter.  Abreast the “Agamemnon” was a small inlet, Porto Agro, about three miles from