Nelson shared this opinion, the accuracy of which was soon to be tested and proved.  “They at home,” wrote he to his wife, “do not know what this fleet is capable of performing; anything and everything.  The fleets of England are equal to meet the world in arms; and of all the fleets I ever saw, I never beheld one, in point of officers and men, equal to Sir John Jervis’s, who is a commander-in-chief able to lead them to glory.”  To a friend he wrote:  “Mann is ordered to come up; we shall then be twenty-two sail-of-the-line such as England hardly ever produced, commanded by an admiral who will not fail to look the enemy in the face, be their force what it may.  I suppose it will not be more than thirty-four of-the-line.”  “The admiral is firm as a rock,” wrote at the same moment the British viceroy of Corsica.  Through all doubts and uncertainties he held on steadily, refusing to leave the rendezvous till dire necessity forced him, lest Mann, arriving, should be exposed alone and lost.  At last, with starvation staring him in the face if delaying longer, he sailed for Gibraltar, three men living on the rations of one during the passage down.

Mann’s defection had reduced the fleet from twenty-two vessels to fifteen.  A series of single accidents still further diminished it.  In a violent gale at Gibraltar three ships-of-the-line drove from their anchors.  One, the Courageux, stretching over toward the Barbary coast, ran ashore there and was totally wrecked, nearly all her crew perishing.  Her captain, a singularly capable seaman named Hallowell, was out of her upon a courtmartial, and it was thought she would not have been lost had he been on board.  Another, the Gibraltar, struck so heavily on a reef that she had to be sent to England.  Upon being docked, a large piece of rock was found to have penetrated the bottom and stuck fast in the hole.  Had it worked out, the ship would have foundered.  The third vessel, the Zealous, was less badly hurt, but she had to be left behind in Gibraltar when Jervis, by orders from home, took his fleet to Lisbon.  There, in entering the Tagus, a fourth ship was lost on a shoal, so that but eleven remained out of twenty-two.  Despite these trials of his constancy, the old man’s temper still continued “steady as a rock.”  “Whether you send me a reinforcement or not,” he wrote to the Admiralty, “I shall sleep perfectly sound,—­not in the Tagus, but at sea; for as soon as the St. George has shifted her topmast, the Captain her bowsprit, and the Blenheim repaired her mainmast, I will go out.”  “Inactivity in the Tagus,” he wrote again, “will make cowards of us all.”  This last expression summed up much of his naval philosophy.  Keep men at sea, he used to say, and they cannot help being seamen, though attention will be needed to assure exercise at the guns.  And it may be believed he would thus contemn the arguments which supported Howe’s idea of preserving the ships by retaining them in port.  Keep them at sea, he would doubtless have replied, and they will learn to take care of themselves.