The battle is mainly of interest on account of Nelson’s part in it. The Spaniards were sailing in no order whatever, the bulk of them being in one irregular mass, the remainder in another. Jervis, in line ahead, proposed to pass between the two divisions, and destroy the larger before the smaller could beat up to assist them. The Spaniards, however inefficient they may have been in other ways, saw through this manœuvre, and their main body was preparing to join up astern of the British, when Nelson, in the _Captain_, flung himself across them and captured two ships by falling foul of them and boarding. Three other ships were captured, the rest escaped. In this battle, as in those of the year before, the same caution about following up the victory was observed, and the age of the admiral concerned has again been produced as the reason. But the thoughtful--taking the previous career of most of those concerned into consideration--may suspect the existence of some special secret orders about taking no risks, as yet unearthed by any historian. The only really workable alternative is Napoleon’s “destiny” theory already alluded to. Of the two, the secret order hypothesis is the more practical. Into the whole of these victories not properly followed up, it is also possible, though hardly probable, that the mutinous state of the _personnel_ entered. [Illustration: THE “FOUDROYANT” ONE OF NELSON’S OLD SHIPS.] In the battle of Cape St. Vincent, the Spaniards had an enormous four-decker, the _Santissima Trinidad_, of 130 guns. She was the first ship engaged by Nelson, and was hammered by most of the others closely engaged as well, but her size and power saved her from the fate of the rest of the ships that were with her. It is difficult even now to assess the exact situation of the mutineers of 1797. The organised self-restraint of the Spithead Mutiny is hard to understand, when we remember the heterogeneous origin of the crews. “Jail or Navy” was an every-day offer to prisoners. Longshoremen, riff-raff, pressed landsmen, thieves, murderers, smugglers, and a few degraded officers, were the raw material of which the crews were composed. They were stiffened with a proportion of professional seamen, and it is these that must have leavened the mass, and kept the jail-bird element in check. Pay was bad, ship life close akin to prison life, discipline and punishments alike brutal, and the food disgracefully bad. It was this last that brought about the mutiny. There is an old saying to the effect that you may ill-treat a sailor as you will, but if you ill-feed him, trouble may be looked for! One or two isolated mutinies, like that of the _Hermione_, were due to a captain’s brutality; but mainly and mostly bad food and mutiny were closely linked.