six others were told off to leave at once in turn.  Nelson did not dare to take the fleet in mass to Tetuan, as he used to Madalena; for he could never be sure of getting out of the Straits when he wished, or when the enemy moved.  Thus his fleet was reduced, by both administrative and strategic exigencies, to twenty-three ships-of-the-line.  Fortunately, four more joined before the battle, raising the numbers actually engaged to twenty-seven.  It will be recognized that Calder’s ninety-gun ship was no small loss.

Such were the general dispositions in which the sailing of the enemy was awaited.  A main body of eighteen to twenty, fifty miles west of Cadiz, a frigate squadron close in to the harbor, and two groups of ships-of-the-line extended between these extremes.  With a westerly wind, approach to the port would be easy for all; with an easterly, Nelson wrote to Blackwood, he would habitually beat up for Cadiz, never going north of the port.  His whereabouts in case of thick weather was thus always known.  He notified Collingwood and his other subordinates, that if the enemy came out, he should stand for Cape Spartel, the African outpost of the Straits, to bar the entrance of the allies to the Mediterranean.  Signals were arranged, precise, yet not so elaborate as to tend to confusion, by which the departure and general direction of the enemy could be continually transmitted, from the furthest lookouts to the main body, by night as by day.

On the 13th of October his old ship, the “Agamemnon,” joined the fleet.  She was commanded by Sir Edward Berry, who had been first lieutenant in her with Nelson, had accompanied him in boarding the “San Nicolas” and “San Josef” at St. Vincent, and was afterwards his flag-captain at the Nile.  When her approach was reported to the admiral, he exclaimed gleefully, “Here comes Berry!  Now we shall have a battle;” for Berry, having been in more fleet actions than any captain in the British Navy,[131] had a proverbial reputation for such luck.  The event did not belie the prediction.  Five days later, on the 18th of the month, Nelson noted in his diary:  “Fine weather, wind easterly; the combined fleets cannot have finer weather to put to sea;” and the following morning, at half-past nine, the signal, repeated from masthead to masthead, from the inshore frigates to their commander-in-chief fifty miles at sea, announced that the long-expected battle was at hand—­for “The Enemy are coming out of port.”

FOOTNOTES: 

[121] May, 1805.

[122] The author does not here understand the speaking of “two or three” rear ships, when the van is supposed to be five or six—­making a total of not over nine or ten enemies.  If this order of attack was issued, as expressly stated by Clarke and M’Arthur, on the chase to the West Indies, Nelson then was fully aware that he with ten ships was in pursuit of eighteen. (See ante,