Six months of pitching and rolling in the dreary Bay of Biscay was the _Temeraire's_ lot at the outset, as one of Vice-Admiral Calder's squadron watching Rochefort. The most disliked of all billets perhaps was blockade duty off the Basque Roads, ever facing the dreary sand dunes of Aix and Oleron, stretching wearily along the featureless coast, there and back, between Sables d'Olonne and the mouth of the Gironde, buffeted week in week out by persistent gales and rough weather. All there was to do, practically, was now and again to stop some wretched neutral passing by--usually a Portuguese trading brig, or a Prussian galliot, for or from Bordeaux--and examine her papers; but for days together sometimes-- The Wind at the West or thereabout, Nothing gone in and nothing come out, was all that went down in their logs, according to the refrain on the dull routine of their daily life of a gun-room ditty composed on board one of the ships blockading Rochefort. Every two or three months, as her turn came round, one or other of the ships would part company for a week or ten days and proceed to Cawsand Bay--communicating on the way with the fleet off Brest to take letters for England--to fill up her water-casks and take in fresh stores and provisions, overhaul spars and rigging, and then return bringing bullocks and bread and vegetables for the squadron. That was their only relaxation. In her turn, towards the end of May, the _Temeraire_ went in to Cawsand Bay, as the 'Plymouth Report' of the Naval Chronicle records. _May 26._--Came in from the Channel Fleet, which she left all well, last Wednesday, the _Temeraire_ of 98 guns. The enemy as usual. Our frigates frequently go in to reconnoitre within a mile and a half of the outer-most ships, and within range of their shots and shells of which the enemy give them plenty but without damage. In August, when Collingwood had relieved Calder, a closer watch on the enemy than before was maintained, owing to the prevalence of rumours that the French were on the point of putting to sea. Collingwood, we are told, frequently passed the night on the quarter-deck of his flagship, at intervals lying down on a gun-carriage to snatch a short sleep, 'from which Admiral Collingwood would rise from time to time to sweep the horizon with his night glass lest the enemy should escape in the dark.'[87] The French, though, remained quiet all the time. One or two of their ships would come out now and then and exercise at sail drill in Basque Roads, and they had a small sham fight once, but no attempt was made to run or force the blockade.