24 HOOD NEVER DECEIVED

are decisive on the subject. Whether in their intercepted despatches or in their conversations with Moore, they alike assert that they were obliged to surrender by famine alone. The heroic 1200 troops and seamen to whose attack Nelson attributes the surrender never, as Moore says, " advanced an inch." Had they done so they must have been cut up. The numbers of the garrison were 6000, not 3500. Nelson's " gasconade," as Mahan rightly calls it—" I always was of opinion, have ever acted on it, and never have had any reason to repent it, that one Englishman was equal to three Frenchmen "x—had no support whatever from this case to which he nevertheless applied it The action of the 1200 had no influence whatever on the siege. It will be seen that shortly afterwards the loss of ammunition involved in their operations had a very serious effect in endangering subsequent success. Nevertheless, my conviction is that Hood was never deceived as to the means by which Bastia could be reduced. There is in the British Museum a letter from Hood to Paoli, dated as early as March 3rd, 1794, in which he says, "The French are, however, so distressed for provisions they cannot long hold out."2 That being so I am inclined to believe that Hood, in the attack by batteries against the town, was playing a game of bluff, that he was not in the least imposed upon by Nelson, that he knew well all the time that it was by famine and by famine alone that Bastia could be reduced, but that he wished to have the credit of making an actual attack, thus playing to the gallery at home.

It is to be remarked that it is not fair, as is done too often in the "Life of Sir Gilbert Elliot," to speak of

1 " Life of Kelson,7' vol. i. p. 125.

2 Brit. Mus., 22,988.