confident as he was in his own conclusions in dilemmas, his mind was too sane and well balanced to refuse direct and credible evidence.  Summing up the situation with lamentations, six weeks later, he said to Davison:  “When I follow my own head, I am, in general, much more correct in my judgment, than following the opinion of others.  I resisted the opinion of General Brereton’s information till it would have been the height of presumption to have carried my disbelief further.  I could not, in the face of generals and admirals, go N.W., when it was apparently clear that the enemy had gone south.”  His purpose had been not to anchor, but to pick up such ships-of-the-line as he found there,—­two seventy-fours,[101] as it turned out,—­and to proceed with them to Martinique, which he naturally assumed to be the enemy’s headquarters.  As it was, receiving a pressing request from the commanding general at Barbadoes to let him accompany the fleet with two thousand troops, he anchored in Carlisle Bay at 5 P.M.  At half-past nine the next morning he was again under way for Trinidad.  Some curious misunderstandings maintained this mistaken impression as to the enemy’s actions, until communication with Trinidad was had on the evening of June 7th.  It was found then that no hostile force had appeared, although the British fleet for a moment had been believed to be such.

Nelson at once started north again.  A report reached him that a second squadron, of fourteen French and Spanish ships from Ferrol, had arrived at Martinique.  He said frankly that he thought this very doubtful, but added proudly:  “Powerful as their force may be, they shall not with impunity make any great attacks.  Mine is compact, theirs must be unwieldy, and although a very pretty fiddle, I don’t believe that either Gravina or Villeneuve know how to play upon it.”  On the 9th he for the first time got accurate information.  An official letter from Dominica[102] announced that eighteen ships-of-the-line, with smaller vessels, had passed there on the 6th of June.  But for the false tidings which on the 4th had led him, first to pause, and then to take a wrong direction, Nelson argued, and not unjustly, that he would have overtaken them at this point, a bare hundred miles from Barbadoes.  “But for wrong information, I should have fought the battle on June 6th where Rodney fought his.”  The famous victory of the latter was immediately north of Dominica, by which name it is known in French naval history.  “There would have been no occasion for opinions,” wrote Nelson wrathfully, as he thought of his long anxieties, and the narrow margin by which he failed, “had not General Brereton sent his damned intelligence from St. Lucia; nor would I have received it to have acted by it, but that I was assured that his information was very correct.  It has almost broke my heart, but I must not despair.”  It was hard to have borne so much, and then to miss success from such a cause.  “Brereton’s wrong information could not be doubted,” he told his intimates, “and by following it, I lost the opportunity of fighting the enemy.”  “What a race I have run after these fellows; but God is just, and I may be repaid for all my moments of anxiety.”