As autumn drew towards winter, the bitter cold went through his feeble frame, and in the wild weather he was "always tossed about, and always sea-sick." "We have had a most terrible winter," he writes, even before the New Year. "It has almost knocked me up. I have been very ill, and am now far from recovered; but I hope to hold out till the battle is over, when I must recruit." "My heart, my Lord, is warm," he tells Lord Hobart, the Secretary of State for War, "my head is firm, but my body is unequal to my wishes. I am visibly shook; but as long as I can hold out, I shall never abandon my truly honourable post." He feared also blindness. "My eyesight fails me most dreadfully," he writes to his old friend Davison. "I firmly believe that, in a very few years, I shall be stone-blind. It is this only, of all my maladies, that makes me unhappy; but God's will be done." The first winter was unusually severe, and during it was added, to his official cares and personal suffering, an extreme anxiety about Lady Hamilton, for he was expecting the birth of a second child in January. This child, a girl, lived but a short time; he never saw her. The effect of these various causes upon his health was so great, that the physicians, as early as January, 1804, were advising his return. "The medical gentlemen are wanting to survey me, and to send me to Bristol for the re-establishment of my health," he tells Minto; but he adds, "do not mention it (it is my concern) I beg of you." Reports were then unusually persistent that the enemy was about to put to sea. "Imust not be sick until after the French fleet is taken."
To the last moment the destination of the French and the purposes of Bonaparte remained unknown to him, a fruitful source of guessing and worry. "It is at best but a guess," he wrote to Ball, after a year's pondering, "and the world attaches wisdom to him that guesses right." Yet his conclusions, however reached, though subject to temporary variations, were in the main correct. Strongly impressed though he was with the importance and exposure of Egypt, he inclined upon the whole to the belief that the French were bound to the westward, out of the Straits and into the Atlantic. This confirmed him in taking his general summer rendezvous to the westward, where he was to windward of such a movement, as well as interposed between Toulon and any Spanish fleet attempting to go there. "My station to the westward of Toulon, an unusual one," he writes to Addington in August, 1803, "has been taken upon an idea that the French fleet is bound out of the Straits and probably to Ireland. I shall follow them to the Antipodes." Two months later he says: "Plausible reasons may certainly be given for every one of the plans" suggested by his various correspondents; but he thinks that either Alexandria or outside the Mediterranean is the most probable. "To those two points my whole attention is turned." "Their destination, is it Ireland or the Levant? That is what I want to know;" but in December he still holds to his first impression: "My opinion is, certainly, out of the Mediterranean."
In this perplexity Elliot suggested to him to receive on board the fleet some good Frenchmen, who could land from time to time and get information in Toulon,—a proposition which drew from Nelson a characteristic and amusing explosion. "Mr. Elliot wanted to send me some good Frenchmen, to go ashore and get me information. My answer to all these offers is 'No.' I can be told nothing of any consequence to me; but a copy of the French admiral's orders, when he is to put to sea, and where he is destined to, is the only useful information I can care about. I can see the number and force at Toulon any day I please, and as for the names of the Captains or Admirals I care not what they are called; therefore, as you may suppose, I have none of these 'good Frenchmen' about me." "I put no confidence in them," he tells Elliot. "You think yours good: the Queen thinks hers the same: I believe they are all alike. Whatever information you can get me, I shall be very thankful for; but not a Frenchman comes here. Forgive me, but my mother hated the French." "I never trust a Corsican or a Frenchman. I would give the devil ALL the good ones to take the remainder."
As winter advanced, his perplexities increased, for each correspondent, by long dwelling on his particular concern, saw its danger and importance growing in his own eyes, and dwelt upon them with greater emphasis in his letters. "Ball is sure they are going to Egypt; the Turks are sure they are going to the Morea; Mr. Elliot at Naples, to Sicily; and the King of Sardinia, to his only spot. Every power thinks they are destined against them; but whatever the French may intend to do," he concludes, with a quaint humor occasional with him, "I trust, and with confidence, they are destined for Spithead." He recognized, too, that Bonaparte himself was not wholly master of his own projects when contending with such uncertain elements; and the great master of War, in this instance as in many others, had placed his force so centrally, in the heel of Italy, that he threatened with equal facility in two opposite directions, to his own advantage and his enemies' perplexity. "Circumstances may even make it necessary to alter its destination by Buonaparte; Egypt or Ireland, and I rather lean to the latter destination." Anything, indeed, is possible; for, as winter approaches, "we can be sure of nothing in so short a run,"—as to Sardinia or Sicily.
For a little while during February, 1804, he was further stirred up by reports that the French were about to concentrate their naval forces, from Brest and Ferrol, in the Mediterranean; and this he was inclined to believe, unfavorable as the season would be for maritime operations in that stormy sea, with the inexperienced crews of the enemy. In the summer his conviction of the importance of the Mediterranean had fully prepared him for such an attempt. "Naples, the Morea, and ultimately Egypt, are in Buonaparte's view," he had then written. "With this idea, I fully expect that the French fleet from Brest will assuredly come into the Mediterranean, to protect this army across the water. I shall try and fight one party or the other, before they form a junction." "Much may be done before British reinforcements arrive," he reminded St. Vincent. "Your Lordship knows what Admiral Bruix might have done, had he done his duty, and they may buy their experience." Now he says to Ball, "The Admiralty tells me nothing, they know nothing; but my private letters say, that the Brest squadron, as well as Ferrol,[62] is bound here—if so, we shall have work enough upon our hands." Thirty thousand troops, also, were ready to embark in Marseilles and Nice. The conclusion, in view of so great a force assembling, was natural: "Egypt, I have no doubt is the favourite and ultimate object of the Corsican tyrant." Nelson's spirit rises with the occasion. "I shall try to intercept them, but I cannot go so far to the westward as is necessary; for I will not lose sight of the Toulon fleet. What a most zealous man can do to meet all points of difficulty, shall be done. My squadron is the finest for its numbers in the world, and much may be expected of it. Should superior numbers join, we must look it in the face. Nil desperandum! God is good, and our cause is just."
This alarm passed away like others. Bonaparte had no idea of pushing ships into the Mediterranean, or embarking his naval forces on any doubtful experiments, until he had first tested the possibility of that supreme adventure, the invasion of England. When that mighty imagination passed away like a dream that leaves no trace, he ordered his fleets into the Mediterranean, as Nelson had expected, and the result was Trafalgar.
As the spring of 1804 opened, the French admiral at Toulon began to exercise his ships outside the harbor, singly or in small groups, like half-fledged birds learning to fly; or, to use Nelson's expression, "My friend Monsieur La Touche sometimes plays bo-peep in and out of Toulon, like a mouse at the edge of her hole." The only drill-ground for fleets, the open sea, being closed to him, he could do no better than these furtive excursions, to prepare for the eagle's flight Napoleon had prescribed to him. "Last week, at different times, two sail of the line put their heads out of Toulon, and on Thursday, the 5th [April], in the afternoon, they all came out." "Yesterday [the 9th] a rear-admiral and seven sail, including frigates, put their nose outside the harbour. If they go on playing this game, some day we shall lay salt upon their tails, and so end the campaign."
These outings—"capers," Nelson called them—naturally became more venturesome by little and little, as the British suffered them to proceed without serious attempt at molestation, or near approach on their part. Nelson veiled the keenness of his watch, as he crouched for a spring, with a drowsy appearance of caution and indifference. The French admiral, Latouche Tréville, was he who had commanded at Boulogne when Nelson's boats were repelled with slaughter; and it was also he who in 1792 had sent a grenadier to the King of Naples, with a peremptory summons to diplomatic apology in one hand, and a threat of bombardment in the other. For both these affairs Nelson considered he had a personal score to settle. "I rather believe my antagonist at Toulon begins to be angry with me: at least, I am trying to make him so; and then, he may come out, and beat me, as he says he did off Boulogne. He is the Admiral that went to Naples in December, 1792, who landed the grenadier. I owe him something for that."
The French having eight sail-of-the-line certainly ready for sea, and two or three more nearly so—how nearly Nelson was not sure—he now endeavored to lure them out. "I have taken a method of making Mr. La Touche Tréville angry. I have left Sir Richard Bickerton, with part of the fleet, twenty leagues from hence, and, with five of the line, am preventing his cutting capers, which he has done for some time past, off Cape Sicie." "He seems inclined to try his hand with us," he writes a week later, "and by my keeping so great an inferiority close to him, perhaps he may some day be tempted." Nelson had near Toulon at the time nine ships-of-the-line. Had he succeeded in bringing Latouche Tréville to attack his five, he would have hoped, even with such odds, for a decisive victory; but, failing that, he was assured that the Toulon fleet would be out of the game for that summer. It was important to bring matters to an issue, for, as he wrote Elliot, his force was diminishing daily through the deterioration of ships never from the first fit for their work. Measured by the standard of the ships in the Channel, "I have but four sail fit to keep the sea. I absolutely keep them out by management." Except the four, all needed docking, and there was not a dock open to the British west of Constantinople.
But, while thus keenly anxious to force an action, he was wary to obtain tactical conditions that should insure a success, adequate both to the risk he ran, and to the object at which he aimed. "I think their fleet will be ordered out to fight close to Toulon, that they may get their crippled ships in again, and that we must then quit the coast to repair our damages, and thus leave the coast clear; but my mind is fixed not to fight them, unless with a westerly wind, outside the Hières, and with an easterly wind, to the westward of Sicie." Crippled there, to leeward of their port, the other British division coming up fresh, as a reserve, from the southward, where it lay concealed, would both cut them off, and rescue any of their own fleet that might have been overpowered. Bickerton's orders were to remain due south from Port Cros, one of the Hyères, at a distance such that, with the upper canvas furled, his ships could not be seen from the islands, but could keep the main division in sight from their mastheads. In all cases of anticipated battle, Nelson not only took his measures thus thoughtfully, but was careful to put his subordinates in possession both of his general plans, and, as far as possible, of the underlying ideas. Thus, in a memorandum issued about this time to the captains, he says: "As it is my determination to attack the French fleet in any place where there is a reasonable prospect of getting fairly alongside of them, I recommend that every captain will make himself, by inquiries, as fully acquainted as possible with the following places, viz., Hières Bay, [with its three entrances], Gourjean Bay, (of which I send a chart from the latest surveys made,) Port Especia, and, in particular the northern Passage into Leghorn Roads, from which side it is only, in my opinion, possible to attack an enemy's fleet to advantage; and with the Gulf of Ajaccio." To these instructions he adds some details of practical preparation for anchoring under fire, and the reasons therefor. In the same spirit, when expecting the Brest fleet in the Mediterranean, he says: "I am perfectly prepared how to act with either a superior or an inferior force. My mind is firm as a rock, and my plans for every event fixed in my mind." No man ever was served better than Nelson by the inspiration of the moment; no man ever counted on it less.