The French Grand Orient Fleet had twenty-three battleships, four of which had undergone major repairs. They were survivors of the last Mediterranean naval battle.
Of the eleven battleships damaged in the previous great battle against the British, seven had been completely scrapped—not to mention the countless small and medium-sized vessels that had been destroyed. The Grand Orient Fleet had been severely weakened.
But the British could hardly worry about that just then. The arrival of reinforcements alone was enough to send them into raptures.
The French Grand Orient Fleet still looked enormous. After all, the leaders of the French Second Republic had no desire to let the British look down on them.
Build another fleet in such a short time? Of course that was impossible!
But they could lease ships, and they could seize them by force. After all, the country was in the midst of an economic crisis, and with the old dynasty giving way to a new one, they had more than enough excuses.
With the French Second Republic's government backing them, the Grand Orient Fleet's sailors held nothing back. They requisitioned every merchant ship whose owners had evaded taxes, underpaid them, owed back taxes, or lacked connections in the government.
As mentioned earlier, there was no unbridgeable gulf between large merchant ships and small and medium-sized warships. The Grand Orient Fleet's shipyards had simply refitted the vessels, turning out more than a hundred additional warships.
The Grand Orient Fleet now looked like a forest of masts, blotting out the sky. Old Edward Hobart Seymour and all the British sailors were convinced that the Austrian Imperial Navy would surely retreat.
Although the Austrian Navy seemed to hold an overwhelming advantage and had been relentlessly pursuing the British fleet, that advantage was not as great as it appeared. Otherwise,