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A biography of Robert Blake, General at Sea, 1598–1657
Excerpt: When Nelson was about to sail on the one unsuccessful enterprise of his life - the attack on Santa Cruz de Tene rife - e-he wrote these words to Earl St. Vincent: 'i do not reckon myself equal to Blake: but, if I recollect right, he was more obliged to the wind coming off the land than to any exertions of his own.' The greatest sailor since our world began' was not wholly just in his implied criticism on the seventeenth-century Ad miral. Blake did not sail into the harbour of Santa Cruz blindly relying on the chapter of accidents to give him a means of retreat, but this sentence is none the less peculiarly fit to stand at the head of his bio graphy. If Robert Blake had no other claim to be remembered, it would still be enough to entitle him to a high place among our heroes, that he planned and successfully carried out an enterprise which, a hundred and fifty years later, in the midst of a war of continual victories, still seemed over-bold to Horatio Nelson.