Before that one defeat of his at Teneriffe when he lost his arm, he wrote to his Commander-in-chief--this letter, by the way, was the last he ever wrote with his right hand--expressing solicitude for everybody but himself. None knew better than he the desperate nature of the venture, for in this very letter he said that on the morrow his head would probably be crowned either with laurel or cypress, and the last thing he did before he left his ship was to call his stepson to help him in burning his wife’s letters, and then ordered him to remain behind, saying: “Should we both fall, what would become of your poor mother?” Happily Lieutenant Nisbet disobeyed the order to his face and went. When the bullet shattered Nelson’s arm at the elbow, it was his stepson who had the presence of mind to whip off his silk handkerchief and bind it round above the wound. But for this, Nelson would never have fought another battle, for he must have bled to death before he reached his ship. It so happened that he could have been put much sooner on board the _Sea Horse_, but her commander, Captain Freemantle, was still on shore, and, for all he knew, might be dead or alive. His wife was on board the _Sea Horse_, and Nelson, wounded and bleeding as he was, insisted on going on, saying: “I would rather suffer death than alarm Mrs. Freemantle by letting her see me in this state when I can give her no tidings of her husband.” Freemantle, as it turned out, had been wounded in almost exactly the same place only a few minutes before. When Nelson got back to his own ship, he would not hear of being slung or carried up on deck. “I’ve got one arm and two legs left,” he said, “and I’ll get up by myself.” And so he did, and up a single rope at that. In a strong man this would have been wonderful; in a mere weakling as Nelson physically was, it was little short of a miracle. This was the man who, in the Battle of Cape St. Vincent, with an utterly disabled ship, boarded and took two Spanish men-of-war both bigger than his own. One of them had eighty and the other a hundred and twelve guns; his own only mounted seventy-four. It is, of course, entirely out of the question that in such a mere sketch as this I should attempt to follow Nelson through even a moderate proportion of the hundred and five engagements in which he personally fought, nor would it be fitting that I should attempt to emulate the brilliant and detailed descriptions which have illustrated the principal of them.