The net results of this stirring week completely relieved the fears of the British ministers.  Whatever the objects of the concentration at Cadiz, they were necessarily frustrated.  Though the first attack was repulsed, the three French ships had been very roughly handled; and, of the relieving force, three out of six were now lost to the enemy.  “Sir James Saumarez’s action has put us upon velvet,” wrote St. Vincent, then head of the Admiralty; and in the House of Peers he highly eulogized the admiral’s conduct, as also did Nelson.  The former declared that “this gallant achievement surpassed everything he had ever met with in his reading or service,” a statement sufficiently sweeping; while the praise of the hero of the Nile was the more to be prized because there never was cordial sympathy between him and Saumarez.  Closely as they had been associated, Nelson’s letters to his brother officer began always “My dear Sir James,” not “My dear Saumarez.”

In this blaze of triumph the story of Saumarez fitly terminates.  He was never again engaged in serious encounter with the enemy.  The first war with the French republic ended three months after the battle of Algeciras.  After the second began, in 1803, he was, until 1807, commander-in-chief at the Channel Islands, watching the preparations for the invasion of England, and counteracting the efforts of cruisers against British commerce.  In 1808, in consequence of the agreements of Tilsit between the Czar and Napoleon, affairs in the Baltic became such as to demand the presence of a large British fleet,—­first to support Sweden, then at war with Russia, and later to protect the immense British trade, which, under neutral flags and by contraband methods, maintained by way of the northern sea the intercourse of Great Britain with the Continent.  Of this trade Sweden was an important intermediary, and her practical neutrality was essential to its continuance.  This was insured by the firm yet moderate attitude of Sir James Saumarez, even when she had been forced by France to declare war against Great Britain.

It may be said without exaggeration that from this time, and until the breach between Napoleon and Russia in 1812, the maritime interest of the war between Great Britain and France centred in the Baltic.  Elsewhere the effective but monotonous blockade of the continental ports controlled by the French Emperor absorbed the attention of the British fleets.  Of great battles there were none after Trafalgar.  To Saumarez, therefore, fell the most distinctive, and probably also the most decisive, field of work open to the British navy.  The importance of the Baltic was twofold.  It was then the greatest source of materials essential to ship-building—­commonly called naval stores; and further, the Russian part of its coast line, being independent of Napoleon’s direct regulation, was the chief means of approach by which Great Britain maintained commercial intercourse with the Continent, to exclude her from which had become the leading object with the Emperor.  The contravention of his policy in this way, in disregard, as he claimed, of the agreements existing between him and the Czar, led eventually to the Russian war, and so finally to his own overthrow and the deliverance of the Continent from his domination.