The power thus to reward at discretion, and speedily, though liable to abuse, was, he claimed, essential to the due influence of a commander-in-chief; his subordinates must feel that it was in his power to make their future, to distinguish them, and that they were in so far dependent upon him.  Nevertheless, with him as with others, personal interest had a weight which qualified his argument.  The premature[73] and disastrous promotion of his stepson, at his request, by St. Vincent, was a practical abuse which in most minds would outweigh theoretical advantages.  Writing to Sir Peter Parker about this time, he said, “You may be assured I will lose no time in making your grandson a postcaptain.  It is the only opportunity ever offered me, of showing that my feelings of gratitude to you are as warm and alive as when you first took me by the hand:  I owe all my honours to you, and I am proud to acknowledge it to all the world.”  Such enduring gratitude is charming to see, and tends to show that Nelson recognized some other reason for Parker’s favor to himself than deference to Suckling’s position; but it is scarcely a good working principle for the distribution of official patronage, although the younger Parker was a good and gallant officer.

Among the military duties that weighed upon Nelson, not the least was the protection of British trade.  The narrow waters of the Mediterranean favored the operations of privateers, which did not have to go far from their ports, and found shelter everywhere; for the littoral states, in their weakness and insecurity, could but feebly enforce neutrality either in their continental or insular territories.  In fact, both parties to the war, Great Britain and France, derived from the infringement of neutrality advantages which checked their remonstrances, and gave the feebler nations an apt retort, when taken to task in their painful efforts to preserve an attitude that was rather double-faced than neutral.  If France, on the one hand, was deriving a considerable revenue from Spanish subsidies, and subsisting an army corps upon Neapolitan territory, Great Britain, on the other, could scarcely have maintained her fleet in the Gulf of Lyons, if unable to get fresh provisions and water from neutral ports; for, save Gibraltar and Malta, she had none that was her own or allied.  Under these conditions, small privateers, often mere rowboats, but under the colors of France or the Italian Republic, swarmed in every port and inlet; in the Adriatic,—­a deep, secluded pocket, particularly favorable to marauding,—­in the Ionian Islands, along the Barbary coast, upon the shores of Spain, and especially in Sicily, whose central position and extensive seaboard commanded every trade-route east of the Balearics.