Meanwhile, and up to the 15th of December, when Orde’s letter was received, no reply had come to his application for leave, and no intimation of a successor.  A fresh complication here arose by the entire break-down of one of his two junior admirals—­Rear-Admiral Campbell—­whose health became so affected that it was necessary to send him immediately home.  He quitted the fleet on the 4th of December.  Nelson rightly felt that he himself could not go, leaving Bickerton without any assistant.  He went further; for, when a rumor came that Orde was to relieve him, he determined that he would offer his services to him, as second, until a successor to Campbell should arrive.  As there was friction between himself and Orde, who had, besides, a not very pleasant official reputation, this intention, to take a lower place where he had been chief, was not only self-sacrificing, but extremely magnanimous; it was, however, disfigured by too much self-consciousness.  “I have wrote to Lord Melville that I should make such an offer, and that I entreated him to send out a flag-officer as soon as possible, but I dare say Sir John Orde is too great a man to want my poor services, and that he will reject them; be that as it may, you will, I am sure, agree with me, that I shall show my superiority to him by such an offer, and the world will see what a sacrifice I am ready to make for the service of my King and Country, for what greater sacrifice could I make, than serving for a moment under Sir John Orde, and giving up for that moment the society of all I hold most dear in this world?”

Orde’s letter reached Nelson in Pula Roads, in the Gulf of Cagliari, at the southern extremity of Sardinia; an out-of-the-way position which probably accounts for much of its delay.  He remained there, or in the Gulf of Palmas, a little to the westward, for about a week, and on the 19th of December left for his station off Cape San Sebastian.  At the latter place, on Christmas Day, he was joined by the “Swiftsure,” which brought him a great batch of official mail that had come out with Orde.  He thus received at one and the same time his leave to go home and the Admiralty’s order reducing his station.  Unluckily, the latter step, though taken much later than the issuing of his leave, had become known to him first, through Orde; and the impression upon his mind remained with that firmness of prejudice which Radstock had noted in him.  He does not appear at any time to have made allowance for the fact that his command was cut down under a reasonable impression that he was about to quit it.

Immediately after the “Swiftsure” joined at Rendezvous 97, he took the fleet off Toulon.  The enemy was found to be still in port, but the rumors of an approaching movement, and of the embarkation of troops, were becoming more specific.  He remained off the harbor for at least a week, and thence went to Madalena, where he anchored on the 11th of January, 1805.  This was, though he knew it not, the end of the long watch off Toulon.