Having shifted his flag from the _St George_ to the _Elephant_ (74), a more serviceable ship for the difficult passage, the British fleet, in order of battle, slowly threaded its way through the shoals on the 30th March, Nelson commanding the van, Parker the centre, and Graves the rear. The guns of Cronenburg Castle, dominating the Sound, blazed away, as did those on the armed hulks with which the Danes had hoped to defend the narrow channel, but the Swedish guns maintained a stolid silence. The fleet then anchored a few miles below Copenhagen. Parker, Nelson, and several other officers boarded a lugger to reconnoitre the enemy’s defences. Various soundings were made to the accompaniment of gun-firing, and it was found that the enemy had placed a formidable flotilla, including two 70-gun ships, a frigate, and two dismasted 64-gun ships, in the front of the harbour and arsenal. The Trekroner Battery had also been strengthened. A second council of war was held on the 31st, some interesting particulars of which are furnished by Colonel William Stewart, who was in command of some of the troops. After some difficulties had been stated anent “the three Powers we should either have to engage, in succession or united, in those seas,” Stewart tells us that “Lord Nelson kept pacing the cabin, mortified at everything that savoured either of alarm or irresolution. When the above remark was applied to the Swedes, he sharply observed, ‘The more numerous the better’; and when to the Russians, he repeatedly said, ‘So much the better, I wish they were twice as many, the easier the victory, depend on it.’” “At the battle of Copenhagen,” writes Mr Ferguson, surgeon of the _Elephant_, “I was amongst the companions of the hero. The attempt was arduous in the extreme: no common mind would have dared to conceive it; but it was suited to the exalted enterprise of Lord Nelson. As _his_ was the invigorating spirit of the council that planned the attack, so in the execution _he_ only could have commanded success. During the interval that preceded the battle, I could only silently admire when I saw the first man in all the world spend the hours of the day and night in boats, amid floating ice, and in the severest weather; and wonder when the light shewed me a path marked by buoys, which had been trackless the preceding evening. “On the first day of April, in the afternoon, we took our departure with twelve sail-of-the-line, and a proportionate number of smaller vessels, from the main body of the fleet, then lying about four miles below Copenhagen; and coasted along the outer edge of the shoal called the middle ground, until we doubled its farthest extremities, when the fleet cast anchor. This shoal, of the same extent as the sea front of the town, lies exactly before it, at about three-quarters of a mile in distance; the interval between it and the shore had deep water, and is called the King’s Channel.