On the same day that Bruix turned, Lord Keith, who had also passed close along the French coast between Cannes and Nice,[268] standing to the eastward, reached as far as Monaco. Then the wind shifted to the eastward, and he wrote as follows to Nelson: "Soon after I despatched the 'Telegraph'" (the vessel which saw the French in Vado Bay) "last night, _the wind came fresh from the east_, which is of course a fair wind for the enemy, if bound towards you" (by the east of Corsica) "and a foul wind for me to follow them, which is unfortunate; for, if my information was just, I had no doubt of overtaking them before they had left the coast of Italy; ... but _the defenceless state of Minorca_, without a fleet, the great force prepared (at Cartagena) to attack it, added to my having so far exceeded my orders already, will oblige me to relinquish the pursuit, and return to the protection of that island. But I have detached to your lordship the 'Bellerophon' and 'Powerful' (seventy-fours), which I hope will arrive in time, as I am confident _the French are not thirty leagues hence at this moment_."[269]
Being close in with the shore with an east wind, Keith could only stand off on the port tack, and it would appear that he still clung to the hope of a shift favorable for reaching Bruix; for on the 8th he was sixty miles south of Monaco,[270] not on the route for Minorca. There he received from St. Vincent, who, though relinquishing the immediate command of the fleet, retained that of the station, pressing orders to take a position off the Bay of Rosas. This was evidently intended to block the junction of the two fleets, though St. Vincent could not have known Bruix's purpose to return. Keith did not obey the order; but seems under its influence to have abandoned definitively his hope of overtaking the French, for he made sail for Minorca, and arrived there on the 12th.[271] Had he obeyed St. Vincent he could scarcely have failed to meet Bruix, for at the moment of receiving his letter the two fleets were hardly sixty miles apart, and both would have passed within sight of Cape San Sebastian, the natural landfall of vessels going from Toulon to Cartagena.
Keith remained at Minorca but a few days, during which St. Vincent turned over to him the command of the station as well as of the fleet.[272] He sailed again on the 15th for Toulon; but the British had completely lost trace of the French from the time that they surrendered the touch of them obtained on the 5th of the month. From the 15th of June to the 6th of July[273] was passed groping blindly in the seas between Minorca, Toulon, and Genoa. On the latter date Keith regained Minorca, and there found the twelve ships-of-the-line which Bridport had detached from Ireland on the 1st of June, and which seem to have reached Port Mahon about the 17th of that month.[274] Scarcely an hour after his arrival,[275] information was received of the French having entered Cartagena. The ships that had accompanied Keith on the recent three weeks' cruise had to fill with water; but on the 10th he started for the Straits of Gibraltar with thirty-one ships-of-the-line, on a stern chase—proverbially a long chase—after the allies, known to be bound to the westward.