He told him that shortly before leaving England to join the fleet Nelson had drawn upon it after dinner a plan of his intended attack, and had explained it as follows: 'I shall attack in two lines, led by myself and Collingwood, and I am confident I shall capture their van and centre or their centre and rear.' 'Those,' concluded Sidmouth, 'were his very words,' and remarked how wonderfully they had been fulfilled.[15] Hill and Sidmouth at the time were both old men and the authority is not high, but so far as it goes it would tend to show that an attack in two lines instead of one was still Nelson's dominant idea.

It cannot however safely be taken as evidence that he ever intended a concentration on the van, though in view of the memorandum of 1803 this is quite possible.
Finally, there is the statement of Clarke and McArthur that Nelson before leaving England deposited a copy of his plan with Lord Barham, the new first lord of the admiralty.

This however is very doubtful.

The Barham papers have recently been placed at the disposal of the Society, in the hands of Professor Laughton, and the only copy of the memorandum he has been able to find is an incomplete one containing several errors of transcription, and dated the Victory, October 11, 1805.

In the absence of further evidence therefore no weight can be attached to the oft-repeated assertion that Nelson had actually drawn up his memorandum before he left England.
Coming now to the time when he had joined the fleet off Cadiz, the first light we have is the well-known letter of October 1 to Lady Hamilton.