The wonder is that the seamen of that day did not grow web-footed, or forget what solid ground felt like! Collingwood tells his wife in one letter that he had "not seen a green leaf on a tree" for fourteen months! By way of compensation, these long and stern blockades developed such a race of seamen as perhaps the world has never seen before or since; exhaustless of resource, hardy, tireless, familiar with every turn of sea life, of iron frame and an iron courage which neither tempest nor battle could shake. Great Britain, as a matter of fact, won her naval battles, not because she had better ships or heavier guns than her enemies, but only because she trained a finer race of seamen. Says Brenton, himself a gallant sailor of the period, "I have seen Spanish line-of-battle ships twenty-four hours unmooring; as many minutes are sufficient for a well-manned British ship to perform the same operation. When, on any grand ceremony, they found it necessary to cross their top-gallant yards in harbour, they began the day before; we cross ours in one minute from the deck." But it was these iron blockades that in the long-run thwarted the plans of Napoleon and changed the fate of the world. Cornwallis off Brest, Collingwood off Rochefort, Pellew off Ferrol, Nelson before Toulon, fighting the wild gales of the Bay of Biscay and the fierce north-westers of the Gulf of Lyons, in what Mahan calls "that tremendous and sustained vigilance which reached its utmost tension in the years preceding Trafalgar," really saved England. "Those far-distant, storm-beaten ships, upon which the Grand Army never looked," says Mahan, "stood between it and the dominion of the world." An intellect so subtle and combative as Napoleon's was, of course, strained to the utmost to break or cheat the British blockades, and the story of the one crafty ruse after another which he employed to beguile the British leaders is very remarkable. Even more remarkable, perhaps, is the manner in which these plain-minded, business-like British seamen, for whose mental powers Napoleon cherished the deepest contempt, fathomed his plans and shattered his combinations.