On the 12th of October Nelson received a piece of news which elicited instantaneously a flash of action, illustrative at once of the promptness of his decisions and of the briskness of temper that has been noted already.  A letter arrived from Captain Gore, commanding the detachment outside of the Straits, that two frigates, sent from the Brest squadron by Admiral Cornwallis, had arrived, with a captain senior to himself, who had taken him under his orders, and carried two of Nelson’s frigates off Cadiz to intercept the Spanish treasure-fleet expected there from America.  Cornwallis’s action had been taken by orders from England, but no communication to that effect, either from him or from the Admiralty, reached Nelson at this moment.  Astounded by a measure which could scarcely fail to cause war, and convinced, as he said, that Spain had no wish to go to war with Great Britain, he gave himself a night to pause; but early next day he wrote to the Admiralty, intimating pretty plainly that, if done by its direction, this was not the way the commander of the Mediterranean fleet should receive word of so momentous a step taken in his district, while to Gore he sent emphatic orders to disobey Cornwallis, although the latter was Nelson’s senior.  Summing up with admirable lucidity the facts before him, and thereby proving that the impression under which Cornwallis’s action probably was taken was erroneous, he said:  “Unless you have much weightier reasons than the order of Admiral Cornwallis, or that you receive orders from the Admiralty, it is my most positive directions that neither you, or any ship under your orders, do molest or interrupt in any manner the lawful commerce of Spain, with whom we are at perfect peace and amity.”

It is permissible, because instructive, to note that in this order, while Nelson amply provides for discretion on the part of his subordinate, he throws the full weight of his authority on the difficult horn of a possible dilemma, the act—­so momentous to an officer—­of disobedience to a present superior; in this case the captain sent by Cornwallis.  Contrast this with the Government’s orders to the commander of the troops at Malta, when it wished him to send a garrison to Messina.[77] Instead of saying, “You will send so many men, unless you think you cannot spare them,” its orders ran:  “You will send, if you think you can spare them.”  Of course, as Nelson invariably experienced, an officer addressed in the latter style found always a lion in his path.  So his orders to Gore were not, “Obey, if” but “Disobey, unless;” and Gore knew, as every man in the Mediterranean knew by long trial, that, if he disobeyed, he would have at his back, through thick and thin, the first sea-officer in Great Britain.  But Nelson’s orders were always stamped with the positive, daring, lucid character of his genius and its conceptions; and so, except in unworthy hands, they were fulfilled in spirit as well as in letter.