In this fewness of cruisers he was forced to keep his vessels constantly on the go,—­to the Levant, to the Adriatic, to Sicily, to Italy,—­scouring the coasts for privateers, gathering merchant ships by driblets, picking up information, and at the end of the round returning to Malta with their fractions of the large convoy.  When this was assembled, a frigate or a ship-of-the-line, with one or two smaller ships of war, sailed with it for Gibraltar at a date fixed, approximately, months before.  Meanwhile, at the latter place a similar process of collection had been going on from the ports of the western Mediterranean, and, after the Malta convoy arrived, the whole started together in charge of a division, composed usually of vessels of war that had to return to England for repairs.

To arrange and maintain this complicated process, and to dovetail it with the other necessary cruising duties, having in consideration which ships should first go home, required careful study and long foresight—­infinite management, in fact.  “The going on in the routine of a station,” he tells Ball, who seems to have trod on his toes, “if interrupted, is like stopping a watch—­the whole machine gets wrong.  If the Maidstone takes the convoy, and, when Agincourt arrives, there is none for her or Thisbe, it puzzles me to know what orders to give them.  If they chace the convoy to Gibraltar, the Maidstone may have gone on with it to England, and in that case, two ships, unless I begin to give a new arrangement, will either go home without convoy, or they must return [to Malta] in contradiction to the Admiralty’s orders to send them home; I am sure you see it in its true point of view.”  “I dare not send a frigate home without a convoy,” he says later.  “Not an officer in the service bows with more respect to the orders of the Admiralty than myself,” he writes St. Vincent; “but I am sure you will agree with me, that if I form plans for the sending home our convoys, and the clearing the different parts of the station from privateers, and the other services requisite, and that the Admiralty in some respects makes their arrangements, we must clash.”  Then he points out how the Admiralty diverting a ship, unknown to him, has tumbled over a whole train of services, like a child’s row of blocks.

An extremely critical point in the homeward voyage was the first hundred miles west of Gibraltar; and it was a greater thorn in Nelson’s side, because of a French seventy-four, the “Aigle,” which had succeeded in entering Cadiz just after he got off Toulon.  For the ordinary policing of that locality he assigned a division of three frigates, under a Captain Gore, who possessed his confidence.  “The enemy’s privateers and cruisers,” he tells him, “are particularly destructive to our trade passing the skirts of the station.”  Privateering was thus reduced; but when a convoy sailed, he tried always to have it accompanied through that stage by a ship of size sufficient to grapple with