Gantheaume's
moves: "Whether I have 30,000 or 40,000 men in Ireland, or whether I am
both in England and Ireland, the war is ours."[326]

The objections to the September combination are fairly obvious. It was
exceedingly improbable that the three fleets could escape at the time
and in the order which Napoleon desired, or that crews enervated by
long captivity in port would succeed in difficult operations when
thrust out into the wintry gales of the Atlantic and the Channel.
Besides, success could only be won after a serious dispersion of
French naval resources; and the West Indian expeditions must be
regarded as prompted quite as much by a colonial policy as by a
determination to overrun England or Ireland.[327]

At any rate, if the Emperor's aim was merely to distract us by widely
diverging attacks, that could surely have been accomplished without
sending twenty-six sail of the line into American and African waters,
and leaving to Gantheaume so disproportionate an amount of work and
danger. This September combination may therefore be judged distinctly
inferior to that of July, which, with no scattering of the French
forces, promised to decoy Nelson away to the Morea and Egypt, while
the Toulon and Rochefort squadrons proceeded to Boulogne.

The September schemes hopelessly miscarried. Gantheaume did not elude
Cornwallis, and remained shut up in Brest. Missiessy escaped from
Rochefort, sailed to the West Indies, where he did some damage and
then sailed home again. "He had taken a pawn and returned to his own
square."[328] Villeneuve slipped out from Toulon (January 19th, 1805),
while Nelson was sheltering from westerly gales under the lee of
Sardinia; but the storm which promised to renew his reputation for
good luck speedily revealed the weakness of his ships and crews.

"My fleet looked well at Toulon," he wrote to Decres, Minister of
Marine, "but when the storm came on, things changed at once. The
sailors were not used to storms: they were lost among the mass of
soldiers: these from sea-sickness lay in heaps about the decks: it was
impossible to work the ships: hence yard-arms were broken and sails
were carried away: our losses resulted as much from clumsiness and
inexperience as from defects in the materials delivered by the
arsenals."[329]

Inexperience and sea-sickness were factors that found no place in
Napoleon's calculations; but they compelled Villeneuve to return to
Toulon to refit; and there Nelson c