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Brittany was a poor province, neither productive nor well-populated, at the extremity of France, and by land the communications between Brest and the rest of the country were most inferior. There were no navigable rivers, no canals. The enormously ponderous materials to equip a fleet could never be brought to Brest by road. The artillery for a first-rate weighed two hundred tons; guns and anchors and shot could only be brought by sea from the foundries in Belgium round to the ships in Brest. The mainmast of a first-rate was a hundred feet long and three feet thick; only ships could transport those, in fact only ships specially equipped.

To man the fleet that lay idle in Brest would call for twenty thousand men. The seamen--what seamen there were--would have to march hundreds of miles from the merchant ports of Le Havre and Marseille if they were not sent round by sea. Twenty thousand men needed food and clothing, and highly specialised food and clothing moreover. The flour to make biscuit, the cattle and pigs and the salt to salt them down, and the barrel-staves in which to store them--where were they to come from? And provisioning was no day-to-day, hand-to-mouth operation, either. Before going to sea the ships would need rations for a hundred days--two million rations to be accumulated over and above daily consumption. Coasting vessels by the hundred were needed--Hornblower observed a constant trickle of them heading into Brest, rounding Ushant from the north and the Pointe du Raz from the south. If war should come--when war should come--it would be the business of the Royal Navy to cut off this traffic. More particularly it would be the business of the light craft to do this--it would be Hotspur's business. The more he knew about all these conditions the better.