Spain was a nerveless power, as Burke said years afterwards, and had not recovered even in the mere number of her population, still less in intellect and character, from the terrible exhaustion of the seventeenth century. Yet her king, Charles III., had tried seriously to supply his dominions with a navy. Happily for us, he was a man of limited intelligence, and made the common mistake of supposing that numbers constituted strength. In 1778 his navy presented a list of 141 vessels, in all of which 62 were of the line. Though his liners were with few exceptions two-deckers of 60 and 70 guns, they were fine ships. Some of them had been built by English shipwrights in the Spanish service. If Charles III. had been content with forty line-of-battle ships, and had spent the money economised on the building vote on giving practice to his squadrons and on forming a good corps of seaman gunners, his navy would have been a more serious opponent than it was. Still, the addition of the sixty-two Spanish liners with all their defects to the French seventy-three constituted a combination able to try the resources of our navy to the utmost. The Dutch Navy had fallen far below the standard of its great days. In 1780, when the United Provinces joined the alliance against us, they had only twenty-six line-of-battle ships of from 50 to 76 guns, and twenty-nine lesser vessels. Great efforts were made to add to this short list during the course of the war, but the additions were made too late to have any considerable effect. Holland, too, though it had not withered to the same extent as its old enemy Spain, had sunk from its former energy. Yet the seamanlike skill of the Dutch crews, their steady gunnery and phlegmatic valour, made them rank higher in the opinion of our navy than the French, and far higher than the Spaniards. The best contested battle of the war took place between an English and a Dutch squadron.