the bodies swung with a jerk aloft, the church flags were hoisted throughout the fleet, and all went to prayers.  Ere yet the ceremony was over, the Spanish gunboats came out from Cadiz and opened fire; but St. Vincent would not mar the solemnity of the occasion by shortening the service.  Gravely it was carried to its end; but when the flags came down, all boats were ordered manned.  The seamen, with nerves tense from the morning’s excitement, gladly hurried into action, and the enemy were forced back into port.

One such incident was far from ending the ordeal through which the admiral had to pass, and which was prolonged throughout the period of the Cadiz blockade.  In May, 1798, when Nelson was sent into the Mediterranean to win the Battle of the Nile, the detachment committed to him was replaced by a dozen ships-of-the-line from the Channel, seething with the mutinous temper which at home had been humored rather than scotched.  Immediately on their joining, request was made for a Court Martial on some men of the Marlborough, on board which two violent mutinies had occurred,—­one on the passage out.  St. Vincent, having known beforehand that this ship had been pre-eminent for insubordination, had ordered her anchored in the centre of the fleet, between the two lines in which it was ranged; and the Court met without delay.  The remainder of the incident is quoted substantially from one of St. Vincent’s biographers, for it illustrates most forcibly the sternness of his action, as well when dealing with weakness in officers as with mutiny in crews.  The written order to the commander of the division of launches appears among the earl’s papers, as does also a similar one in the case of a mutiny on board the Defence some months earlier.  The ulterior object of parading these boats was kept profoundly secret.  They appeared to be only part of the pageantry, of the solemn ceremonial, with which the wisdom of the great commander-in-chief providently sought to invest all exhibitions of authority, in order to deepen impression.

The object of the last mutiny on board the Marlborough had been to protect the life of a seaman forfeited by a capital crime.  No sooner was one sentenced to die than the commander-in-chief ordered him to be executed on the following morning, “and by the crew of the Marlborough alone, no part of the boats’ crews from the other ships, as had been used on similar occasions, to assist in the punishment,—­his lordship’s invariable order on the execution of mutineers.  On the receipt of the necessary commands for this execution, Captain Ellison of the Marlborough waited upon the commander-in-chief, and reminding his lordship that a determination that their shipmates should not suffer capital punishment had been the very cause of the ship’s company’s mutiny, expressed his conviction that the Marlborough’s crew would never permit the man to be hanged on board that ship.