s. The favourite device was
to substitute organised strategical operations against his trade in place
of the old sporadic attacks; that is, the fleet took a position calculated
to stop his trade altogether, not on his own coasts, but far to sea in the
main fairway. The operations failed for lack of provision for enabling the
fleet by systematic relief to retain its position, but nevertheless it was
the germ of the system which afterwards, under riper organisation, was to
prove so effective, and to produce such actions as the "Glorious First of
June."

In the third war, after this device had failed again and again, a new one
was tried. It was Charles the Second's own conception. His idea was to use
the threat of a military expedition. Some 15,000 men in transports were
brought to Yarmouth in the hope that the Dutch would come out to bar their
passage across the open North Sea, and would thus permit our fleet to cut
in behind them. There was, however, no proper coordination of the two
forces, and the project failed.

This method of securing a decision was not lost sight of; Anson tried to
use it in the Seven Years' War. For two years every attempt to seek out the
enemy's fleet had led to nothing but the exhaustion of our own. But when
Pitt began his raids on the French coast, Anson, who had little faith in
their value for military purposes, thought he saw in them definite naval
possibilities. Accordingly when, in 1758, he was placed in command of the
Channel Fleet to cover the expedition against St. Malo, he raised the
blockade of Brest, and took up a position near the Isle of Batz between the
enemy's main fleet and the army's line of passage. The Brest fleet,
however, was in no condition to move, and again there was no result. It was
not till 1805 that there was any clear case of the device succeeding, and
then it was not used deliberately. It was a joint Anglo-Russian expedition
in the Mediterranean that forced from Napoleon his reckless order for
Villeneuve to put to sea from Cadiz, and so solved the problem out of which
Nelson had seen no issue. Lissa may be taken as an analogous case. But
there the Italians, treating the territorial attack as a real attack
instead of as a strategical device, suffered themselves to be surprised by
the Austrian fleet and defeated.

This instance serves well to introduce the important fact, that although
our own military expeditions have seldom succeeded in leading to a naval
decision