By measures such as these, extending to all ranks and every detail, exemplifying, in spirit and in form, the extremes of cordial reward, iron restraint, and weighty punishment, Jervis patiently fashioned the fleet which was to be both a pattern for coming days, and the highly tempered instrument to achieve his own victory of Cape St. Vincent and the earlier triumphs of Nelson; as well as to sustain and to crush the onset of mutiny which soon afterwards shook the Navy to its centre.  For purely military action of an aggressive character no opportunity was afforded him.  His coming to the Mediterranean coincided with that of Napoleon Bonaparte to the Army of Italy.  During 1795, wrote Nelson, if the British fleet had done its duty, the French army could not have moved along the Riviera of Genoa.  It failed, and the Austrian general, its ally, also failed to act with vigor.  So the year had ended, for the Austrians, with a disastrous defeat and a retreat behind the Apennines.  To the Riviera they never returned to receive the co-operation which Jervis stood eager to give.  At their first move to cross the mountains, Bonaparte struck, and followed up his blows with such lightning-like rapidity that in thirty days they were driven back over a hundred miles, behind the Adige; their chief fortress, Mantua, was blockaded; all northwest Italy with its seaboard, including Leghorn, was in the power of France; and Naples also had submitted.  Jervis, powerless to strike a blow when no enemy was within reach, found his fleet without a friendly port nearer than Gibraltar, while Corsica, where alone he could expect anchorage and water, was seething with revolt against the British crown, to which, by its own vote, it had been annexed but two years before.

Amid these adverse circumstances, the only large operation possible to him was the close watching of the port of Toulon, conducted on the same general plan that was afterwards more illustriously exhibited before Brest, between 1800 and 1805, under conditions of surpassing difficulty.  All contemplated movements of the French fleet were thus dammed at the source, for it must first fight the British, after which there was little hope of being in a state to fulfil any further mission.  For six months, from April to October, Jervis held his fleet close up to the port, the advanced body two miles from the entrance.  The effort was admirable as a pattern, and for disciplinary purposes.  The ships, forced to self-dependence, became organically self-reliant.  Their routine life of seamanship and military exercise perfected habit and efficiency, and difficulties to others insuperable were as the light burdens which a giant carries unwittingly.