This appeal broke down all Nelson’s power of resistance.  He deprived himself on the eve of battle of a first-rate ship, taking only the precaution of sending his entire correspondence with Calder, public and private, to explain his course, though scarcely to justify it.  The significance of this act is enhanced by the known importance which he himself attached to the presence or absence of even a third-rate ship-of-the-line.  When the expedition to the Baltic was on the eve of starting, a seventy-four went aground, in leaving the Downs.  Lieutenant Layman having been conspicuously instrumental in getting her off, Nelson told him that he had in consequence written in his favor to the Admiralty; and upon Layman’s remarking that what he had done scarcely deserved so much, the admiral replied, “I think differently, the loss of one line-of-battle ship might be the loss of a victory.”

When Nelson joined the fleet, he found it stationed some fifteen to twenty miles from Cadiz.  He soon moved the main body to fifty miles west of the port.  “It is desirable,” he admitted, “to be well up in easterly winds, but I must guard against being caught with a westerly wind near Cadiz, as a fleet of ships with so many three-deckers would inevitably be forced into the Straits, and then Cadiz would be perfectly free for the enemy to come out with a westerly wind, as they served Lord Keith in the late war.”  The memory of his weary beat out of the Mediterranean the previous April, against wind and current, remained vividly in his mind; and he feared also that the willingness of the enemy to come out, which was his great object, would be much cooled by the certainty that his fleet could not be avoided, and by seeing such additions as it might receive.  “I think we are near enough,” he wrote Colling wood, “for the weather if it is fine, the wind serves, and we are in sight, they will never move.”  “I rely on you,” he tells Blackwood, “that we can’t miss getting hold of them, and I will give them such a shaking as they never yet experienced; at least I will lay down my life in the attempt.”  An advanced squadron of fast-sailing seventy-fours was thrown out ten or twelve miles east of the fleet, through which daily signals could be exchanged with Blackwood’s squadron of frigates, that cruised day and night close to the harbor’s mouth.  This disposition received a farther development after the 10th of October, when the combined fleets shifted from the inner harbor to the Bay of Cadiz, and gave other tokens of a speedy start.  On the 14th of the month he made the following entry in his diary:  “Enemy at the harbour’s mouth.  Placed Defence and Agamemnon from seven to ten leagues west of Cadiz, and Mars and Colossus five leagues east of fleet [that is, under way between the fleet and the former group], whose station is from fifteen to twenty leagues west of Cadiz; and by this chain I hope to have constant communication with the frigates off Cadiz.”  To the captain of the “Defence” he wrote that it was possible the enemy might try to drive off the frigate squadron, in order to facilitate their own evasion; in which case the inner ships-of-the-line would be at hand to resist the attempt.