sly first in
achievement. It was not till the opening of the second war of the
French Revolution, in May, 1803, that he himself had supreme charge of
a station,--his old familiar Mediterranean.

Being held in such esteem, it was but a short time before Nelson was
again sent off from Toulon, to which he did not return during the
British occupation. He was now ordered to report to Commodore Linzee,
then lying with a detachment of three ships-of-the-line in the harbor
of Cagliari, at the south end of Sardinia. On her passage the
"Agamemnon" met and engaged a French squadron, of four large frigates
and a brig. Though without decisive results, Nelson was satisfied with
his own conduct in this affair, as was also Lord Hood when it came to
his knowledge; for, one of the frigates being badly crippled, the
whole force, which was on its way to Nice, was compelled to take
refuge in Corsica, where it was far from secure. Two days later, on
the 24th of October, Cagliari was reached, and the "Agamemnon"
accompanied the division to Tunis, arriving there on the 1st of
November.

Linzee's mission was to try and detach the Bey from the French
interest, and it was hoped he could be induced to allow the seizure
of a number of French vessels which had entered the port, under the
convoy of a ship-of-the-line and four frigates. When the British
entered, the frigates had disappeared, being in fact the same that
Nelson had fought ten days before. In accordance with his
instructions, Linzee strove to persuade the Bey that the Republican
government, because of its revolutionary and bloodthirsty character,
should receive no recognition or support from more regular states, not
even the protection usually extended by a neutral port, and that in
consequence he should be permitted to seize for Great Britain the
vessels in Tunis. The Turk may possibly have overlooked the fallacy in
this argument, which assumed that the protection extended by neutral
governments was rather for the benefit of the belligerent than for the
quiet and safety of its own waters; but he was perfectly clear-sighted
as to his personal advantage in the situation, for the French owners,
in despair of getting to France, were selling their cargoes to him at
one third their value. To the argument that the French had beheaded
their king, he drily replied that the English had once done the same;
and he decisively refused to allow the ships to be molested. Nelson
was disgusted that hi