Similar attention, broad yet minute, was demanded for the more onerous and invidious task of enforcing relaxed discipline and drill.  Concerning these, the most pregnant testimony, alike to the stringency and the persistence of his measures, may be found in the imbittered expressions of enemies.  Five years later, when the rumor spread that he was to have the Channel Fleet, the toast was drunk at the table of the man then in command, “May the discipline of the Mediterranean never be introduced into the Channel.”  “May his next glass of wine choke the wretch,” is a speech attributed to a captain’s wife, wrathful that her husband was kept from her side by the admiral’s regulations.  For Jervis’s discipline began at the top, with the division and ship commanders.  One of the senior admirals under him persisting in a remonstrance, beyond the point which he considered consistent with discipline, was sent home.  “The very disorderly state of His Majesty’s ship under your command,” he writes to a captain, “obliges me to require that neither yourself nor any of your officers are to go on shore on what is called pleasure.”  “The commander-in-chief finds himself under the painful necessity of publicly reprimanding Captains ——­ and ——­ for neglect of duty, in not maintaining the stations assigned to their ships during the last night.”  In a letter to a lieutenant he says, “If you do not immediately make a suitable apology to Commissioner Inglefield for the abominable neglect and disrespect you have treated him with, I will represent your behaviour to the Lords Commissioners of the Admiralty, and recommend your name to be struck off the list of lieutenants.”  Captains of vessels were not only subject to strict regulation as to their personal proceedings, compelled to sleep on board, for instance, even in home ports; but duties customarily left to subordinates, with results to discipline that might not now obtain but which were in those days deplorable, were also assigned to them.

“The commander-in-chief has too exalted an opinion of the respective captains of the squadron to doubt their being upon deck when the signal is made to tack or wear in the night, and he requires all lieutenants then to be at their stations, except those who had the watch immediately preceding.”  Nor did he leave this delicately worded, but pointed, admonition, issued in the Mediterranean, to take care of itself.  In after years, when he was nigh seventy, his secretary tells that on a cold and rainy November night off Brest, the signal to tack being made, he hurried to the cabin to persuade the old man not to go on deck, as was his custom.  He was not, however, in his cot, nor could he for a long time be found; but at last a look into the stern gallery discovered him, in flannel dressing-gown and cocked hat, watching the movements of the fleet.  To remonstrance he replied, “Hush, I want to see how the evolution is performed on such a night, and to know whether Jemmy Vashon (commanding the ship next astern) is on deck;” but soon hearing the captain’s well-known shrill voice, crying, “Are you all ready forward?” he consented then to retire.