A week before, on the 13th of May, the same officer had written:  “Where are you all this time?[94] for that is a point justly agitating the whole country more than I can describe.  I fear that your gallant and worthy chief will have much injustice done him on this occasion, for the cry is stirring up fast against him, and the loss of Jamaica would at once sink all his past services into oblivion.  All I know for certain is that we ought never to judge rashly on these occasions, and never merely by the result.  Lord Barham[95] told me this morning that the Board had no tidings of your squadron.  This is truly melancholy, for certainly no man’s zeal and activity ever surpassed those of your chief....  The world is at once anxious for news and dreading its arrival.”  The Admiralty itself, perplexed and harassed by the hazards of the situation, were dissatisfied because they received no word from him, being ignorant of the weather conditions which had retarded even his frigates so far beyond the time of Villeneuve’s arrival at Cadiz.  Radstock, whose rank enabled him to see much of the members of the Board, drew shrewd inferences as to their feelings, though mistaken as to Nelson’s action.  “I fear that he has been so much soured by the appointment of Sir John Orde, that he has had the imprudence to vent his spleen on the Admiralty by a long, and, to the Board, painful silence.  I am sure that they are out of humour with him, and I have my doubts whether they would risk much for him, were he to meet with any serious misfortune.”

Through such difficulties in front, and such clamor in the rear, Nelson pursued his steadfast way, in anguish of spirit, but constant still in mind.  “I am not made to despair,” he said to Melville, “what man can do shall be done.  I have marked out for myself a decided line of conduct, and I shall follow it well up; although I have now before me a letter from the physician of the fleet, enforcing my return to England before the hot months.”  “Brokenhearted as I am, at the escape of the Toulon fleet,” he tells the governor of Gibraltar, “yet it cannot prevent my thinking of all the points intrusted to my care, amongst which Gibraltar stands prominent.”  “My good fortune seems flown away,” he cries out to Ball.  “I cannot get a fair wind, or even a side wind.  Dead foul!—­dead foul!  But my mind is fully made up what to do when I leave the Straits, supposing there is no certain information of the enemy’s destination.  I believe this ill-luck will go near to kill me; but as these are times for exertions, I must not be cast down, whatever I feel.”  A week later, on the 26th of April, he complains:  “From the 9th I have been using every effort to get down the Mediterranean, but to this day we are very little advanced.  From March 26th, we have had nothing like a Levanter,[96] except for the French fleet.  I have never been one week without one, until this very important moment.  It has half killed me; but fretting is of no use.”  On the 1st of May he wrote to the Admiralty, “I have as yet heard nothing of the enemy;” beyond, of course, the fact of their having passed the Straits.