At the last moment, though, there was further delay; it was over a question of military etiquette. Who should command the expedition—Colonel Adlercron, a King’s officer, or Lieutenant-Colonel Clive, a Company’s officer, who had local rank as colonel? There was further wrangling over this matter, and valuable time was lost, until it was finally settled that the supreme command of both sea and land forces should be vested in Vice-Admiral Watson as senior commissioned officer in the East, with Clive in charge of the troops—both King’s and Company’s. The expedition finally set sail on the 16th of October, two months and ten days after the news of the Black Hole first reached Madras. It comprised five men-of-war—the _Kent_, _Cumberland_, _Tyger_, _Salisbury_, _Bridgewater_, and the _Blaze_, a fireship; three Company’s Indiamen, and two country ships. All the ships carried soldiers and army stores. Vice-Admiral Charles Watson, the Commander-in-Chief in the East Indies, was a capable and zealous leader. He was a naval officer of the very best type, and in addition, it was admitted on all hands, a noble-hearted, considerate English gentleman. He had been very seriously ill while on the way out from England—so ill indeed that, on learning soon after his first arrival at Bombay that there was a possibility of the expected war with the French not breaking out for some time, he had applied to go home again at once on sick leave. When he reached Madras he learnt officially that war was imminent, and he wrote off at once cancelling his application. If that were so there was no going home now for Admiral Watson. Ill as he was, he would stay out to fight the French once more. It was characteristic of the man—of the captain of the _Dragon_ in 1743—who, as the Navy of those days well remembered, when detached by Admiral Mathews from off Toulon, as a special favour to a smart officer, to cruise off Cadiz just when the treasure galleons from the Spanish Main were expected to arrive, with additional instructions to go on afterwards to Lisbon and carry the merchants’ treasure thence to England—the most lucrative employment a naval man could possibly look for—deliberately, on hearing at Gibraltar that a battle was likely to take place off Toulon, turned his back on a sum of prize-money that would have made him wealthy for life, saying, “He thought his ship would be wanted with the fleet.” The old heroic spirit of a captain who had been specially mentioned in dispatches for gallantry in every battle that he fought in—by Mathews off Toulon, and in 1747 by both Anson and Hawke—overcame the bodily weakness of an invalid.