With Gibraltar, however, Malta gave the British two impregnable and secure bases of operations, within reasonable distance of one another, and each in close proximity to points most essential to control.  During Nelson’s entire command, the three chief centres of interest and of danger were the Straits of Gibraltar, the heel of Italy, and Toulon.  The narrowing of the trade routes near the two former rendered them points of particular exposure for merchant shipping.  Around them, therefore, and in dependence upon them, gathered the largest bodies of the cruisers which kept down privateering, and convoyed the merchant ships, whose protection was not the least exacting of the many cares that fell upon Nelson.  Upon the Malta division depended also the watch over the mouth of the Adriatic and the Straits of Messina, by which Nelson hoped to prevent the passage of the French, in small bodies, to either Sicily, the Morea, or the Ionian Islands.  Malta in truth, even in Nelson’s time, was the base for operations only less important than the destruction of the Toulon fleet.  The latter he rightly considered his principal mission, success in which would solve most other maritime difficulties.  “My first object must ever be to keep the French fleet in check; and, if they put to sea, to have force enough with me to annihilate them.  That would keep the Two Sicilies free from any attack from sea.”

On the 8th of July the “Amphion” joined the fleet off Toulon.  It numbered then nine ships-of-the-line, with three smaller cruisers.  “As far as outside show goes,” he reported to St. Vincent, “the ships look very well; but they complain of their bottoms, and are very short of men.”  The fact was, as he afterwards explained, that before the war came they had been expecting every day to go to England, and consequently had been allowed to run down gradually, a result which doubtless had been hastened by St. Vincent’s stringent economies.  Gibraltar and Malta were both bare, Nelson wrote six months later, and it was not the fault of the naval storekeepers.  The ships, everywhere, were “distressed for almost every article.  They have entirely eat up their stores, and their real wants not half complied with.  I have applications from the different line-of-battle-ships for surveys on most of their sails and running rigging, which cannot be complied with, as there is neither cordage nor sails to replace the unserviceable stores, and, therefore, the evil must be combated in the best manner possible.”  As the whole Navy had suffered from the same cause, there was no reserve of ships at home to replace those in the Mediterranean, which, besides lacking everything, were between eight and nine hundred men short of their complement, or about one hundred for each ship-of-the-line.  “We can send you neither ships nor men,” wrote St. Vincent as winter drew on; and even a year later, the administration which followed his found it impossible to replace the “crazy” vessels, of which Nelson said only four were fit for winter cruising.  “It is not a storeship a week,” he declared, “that would keep them in repair.”  The trouble was greater because, when leaving Malta, they had anticipated only a cruise of three weeks, which for many of them became two years.