"We are healthy beyond example, and in great good humour with ourselves," he writes in October, 1803, "and so sharp-set, that I would not be a French Admiral in the way of any of our ships for something." It would be tedious to quote the numerous assertions to the same effect scattered up and down his correspondence at this time; but in December, 1804, when near the end of this long period of suspense, and after eighteen months at sea, he writes to the Admiralty: "The Fleet is in perfect good health and good humour, unequalled by anything which has ever come within my knowledge, and equal to the most active service which the times may call for." Dr.
Gillespie, who joined the "Victory" as physician to the fleet in January, 1805, wrote immediately afterwards that out of her eight hundred and forty men, but one was confined to his bed by sickness, and that the other ships, though upwards of twenty months off Toulon, were in a like condition of health.
The same could not then, nor for long before, be said of Nelson himself.

The first flush of excitement in leaving England and taking command, the expectation and change of scene in going out, affected him favorably.

"As to my health," he says, immediately after joining the fleet, "thank God, I have not had a finger ache since I left England;" but this, unfortunately, did not endure.

It was his first experience of the weightier anxieties of a commander-in-chief; for when he had succeeded to that position, temporarily, in the Mediterranean and the Baltic, he had found either a squadron in good running order, or at the least no serious hitch about necessary maintenance.

Now all this was different.