Alfred Thayer Mahan had lectured that a naval commander with a clear advantage must pursue, attack, and destroy the enemy, and “nothing can excuse his losing a point which by exertion he might have scored.”33 To a colleague who remarked that the British had done “well enough” in a recent battle, Horatio Nelson had famously replied, “If ten ships out of eleven were taken, I would never call it well enough, if we were able to get at the eleventh.”
