When I am forced to send a ship there, I never see her under two months." With Gibraltar, however, Malta gave the British two impregnable and secure bases of operations, within reasonable distance of one another, and each in close proximity to points most essential to control.
During Nelson's entire command, the three chief centres of interest and of danger were the Straits of Gibraltar, the heel of Italy, and Toulon.

The narrowing of the trade routes near the two former rendered them points of particular exposure for merchant shipping.

Around them, therefore, and in dependence upon them, gathered the largest bodies of the cruisers which kept down privateering, and convoyed the merchant ships, whose protection was not the least exacting of the many cares that fell upon Nelson.

Upon the Malta division depended also the watch over the mouth of the Adriatic and the Straits of Messina, by which Nelson hoped to prevent the passage of the French, in small bodies, to either Sicily, the Morea, or the Ionian Islands.

Malta in truth, even in Nelson's time, was the base for operations only less important than the destruction of the Toulon fleet.