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 though sunk, was weighed, and, under the name of San Fiorenzo, continued in the English service during the war. Hood was then anxious to march at once against Bastia, which he believed would fall as easily as San Fiorenzo had done. The general in command of the troops judged the force to be too small, and refused to co-operate. Thereupon Hood, partly at the suggestion of Nelson, who had made himself familiar with the appearance of the place, resolved to attempt it with such forces as he could dispose of, and on 4 April landed about fourteen hundred men—seamen and marines, or soldiers doing duty as marines—and with these and the ships in the offing formed the siege of the town. Nelson was landed in command of the seamen, and under his personal supervision the batteries were built and armed and manned. On 21 May Bastia surrendered, and with it a third of the frigates. On the 24th General Stuart, who had succeeded to the military command, arrived from San Fiorenzo, and it was then resolved to attack Calvi. The operation was necessarily deferred by the news of the French fleet being at sea; but when it took shelter in Golfe Jouan, and there was no prospect of an immediate engagement, on 10 June the Agamemnon was sent back to Bastia, to convoy the troops to the western side of the island. On the 19th they were landed in the immediate neighbourhood of Calvi, Nelson himself taking the command of two hundred seamen, who with infinite toil dragged the heavy guns into position, and afterwards served them in the batteries. On 12 July (‘Nelson's Journal, written Day by Day,’, i. 435; but in a letter to his wife on 18 Aug. he says the 10th, ib. 484) a shot from the town, striking the battery near where he was standing, drove the sand and gravel against his face and breast so as to bruise him severely at the time and to destroy the sight of his right eye. The men, both sailors and soldiers, suffered greatly from the heat, and nearly half the force on shore was down with sickness; but through all difficulties the siege was continued, and on 10 Aug. Calvi surrendered, when the Melpomene and another frigate, the Mignonne, fell into the hands of the English.

This completed the reduction of Corsica, and in October Hood returned to England, leaving the command with Admiral William (afterwards Lord) Hotham [q. v.]; and the Agamemnon, continuing with the fleet, had a very distinguished part in the engagements of 13–14 March and 13 July 1795. Though spoken of as victories, Nelson described them as ‘miserable’ affairs; the results were very imperfect, and ‘the scrambling distant fire was a farce.’ On 15 July he was ordered by Hotham to take command of the frigate squadron in the Gulf of Genoa, and to co-operate with the Austrians. On 4 April 1796 he was ordered to hoist a broad pennant as commodore of the second class; on 11 June, the Agamemnon being in need of a thorough refit, he moved into the Captain, a 74-gun ship; and on 11 Aug. was appointed commodore of the first class, with Ralph Willett Miller [q. v.] as his flag-captain. But these promotions made no change in the service on which he was employed. For upwards of a year he remained in command of the inshore squadron, preventing in great measure the French coasting trade, and harassing their movements on shore. What he effected, and still more what, from want of sufficient force, he failed to effect, are rightly considered as striking examples of the control which sea power is capable of exercising. Nelson always maintained that, if he had been adequately supported, the invasion of Italy could not have taken place. Captain Mahan, in a critical examination of the campaign of 1795, has pointed out that Hotham, while holding the enemy's fleet in check at Toulon, might have substantially increased the squadron with Nelson; this would have been less difficult if Hotham ‘had not thrown away his two opportunities of beating the Toulon fleet’ (Influence of Sea Power upon the French Revolution, i. 199–201).

In November Hotham was superseded by Sir John Jervis (afterwards Earl of St. Vincent) [q. v.]; but the mischief then done was past the power of Jervis to remedy. In 1796 the French rapidly overran the north of Italy, and forced a neutrality on Naples. Spain, too, was compelled to yield; and when her fleet was joined to that of France, the combined force was of such overwhelming numerical strength that orders were sent to Jervis to evacuate Corsica and retire from the Mediterranean. An English garrison still held the island of Elba; but at Gibraltar Nelson was directed to hoist his broad pennant on board the Minerve frigate, and bring away this garrison also. In company with the Blanche, under the commodore's orders, the Minerve sailed from Gibraltar on 15 Dec. 1796, and on the 20th, off Cartagena, fell in with two Spanish frigates, the Sabina and Ceres. The Sabina was engaged by the Minerve; after a stubborn fight she surrendered, and a prize crew was sent on board. The Blanche engaged the Ceres, which also presently struck her colours; but before she could be taken, a Spanish squadron of two ships of the line and two frigates