The interval between the ending of the Toulon blockade and the Battle of Trafalgar was filled chiefly by what may be described as a huge naval hunt. On the one hand, there were three French fleets manœuvring to get out and come together in the Channel with the object of overwhelming any English force that might try to prevent the embarkation of the Grand Army at Boulogne. But they had another object, and that was to get as far as possible out of Nelson’s way.
The first idea was to make a feint at the West Indies, and so away went Admiral Villeneuve with his fleet across the Atlantic, and away went Nelson post-haste after him. He got to the West Indies only to find that the Frenchmen had doubled on their tracks and gone back again, and so he immediately turned the prows of his weather-beaten and almost unseaworthy ships to the eastward, and for the second time chased the French across the Atlantic. But he missed them again, and on July 20, 1805, Nelson made an entry in his diary to the effect that he had that day gone ashore at Gibraltar—the first time that he had left the Victory for two years all but ten days!
From Gibraltar he came home and spent a few weeks of rest at Merton, the estate which he had bought in Surrey. During this time a momentous naval duel was fought in the Channel. Admiral Villeneuve had sent some very important dispatches containing the plans for the concentration of the French and Spanish fleets to the commander of the Rochefort squadron by the Didon, a forty-four-gun frigate; but on her way the Didon was met by the Phœnix, an English forty-gun frigate which, after the fashion of the times, proceeded to pound her to helplessness, then ran alongside and carried her by the board in the good old style. The result of this was that Villeneuve gave up all hope of the concentration and retreated to Cadiz, where he anchored on August 17th.
Admiral Collingwood, in command of the Atlantic squadron, at once sent off the frigate Euryalus home with news. She dropped anchor at Spithead on the 1st of September. At five o’clock the next morning her captain presented himself at Merton and found Nelson already up and dressed. The moment Captain Blackwood entered the room Nelson’s face lit up and he said:
“I’m sure you bring me news of the French and Spanish fleets and I think I shall have to give them a beating yet. Depend upon it, Blackwood, I shall yet give Mr. Villeneuve a drubbing.”
He left for London the same day to consult with the Admiralty, and it was on one of the visits that he then paid to the Secretary of State that he met for a few minutes—and for the only time in his life—the man whose name was destined to be linked with his in everlasting fame. This was Arthur Wellesley, some day to be Duke of Wellington, who was to do for the French on land what Nelson had been doing for them at sea.
Sir Arthur came away with a curious opinion of the little, pale, nervous, fidgety, one-armed man, who had won the two greatest battles in the history of naval warfare, and was about to surpass himself by winning yet a greater one.
From one point of view he was a vain, boastful, and somewhat womanish little man. From another, he was not only a great leader of men, but a statesman to boot. On the whole, the future Iron Duke came to the conclusion that the Hero of the Nile was “a very superior person.”
Nelson’s opinion of Wellington is unhappily lost to posterity. One can imagine the sort of language he would have used if any one had told him that a soldier had ventured to call him “a superior person.”
“For charity’s sake, send us Lord Nelson, ye men of power.” Such was the prayer of Captain Codrington of the Orion, serving with Collingwood’s fleet off Cadiz. But by the time this letter got home Nelson was with the fleet, and it is worthy of note that he reached the last and most glorious of his hundred battlefields on his birthday, the twenty-ninth of September.