CHAPTER X

THE FIRST STAGE OF THE WAR

The authorities for the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars are numerous. An English writer will naturally give the first place in the list to _The Naval History of Great Britain_, by William James, a trustworthy, laborious, and indispensable, but dry and too often unintelligent chronicle, which covers the whole story from 1793 to 1815. The _Naval Chronology_ of Isaac Schomberg ends at the Peace of 1801. Captain Mahan’s _Influence of Sea Power upon the French Revolution and Empire_ is a survey of the principles rather than the mere events of the whole war. On the French side we have Troude, _Batailles navales de la France_, the chronology quoted for earlier chapters; Chevalier, _Histoire de la Marine française sous la première République_, a history up to 1799; Rouvier, _Marins français sous la République_; Moulin, _Les Marins de la République_; Lecène, _Marins de la République et de l’Empire_. The _Naval Chronicle_ (1799-1818) did not begin with the war, but it looks back on events antecedent to its own beginning. Brenton’s _Naval History of Great Britain from 1783 to 1836_, first published in 1823 and recast in 1837, professes to be a general history, but is chiefly valuable for the writer’s personal reminiscences and the traditions of the service which he repeats. An excellent study of one of the most important episodes of the early years of the war is Cottin, _Toulon et les Anglais en 1793_. For the battle of the 1st of June the main authority now is Rear-Admiral Sturges Jackson’s _Logs of the Great Sea Fights 1794-1805_, edited for the Navy Record Society. Sir N. H. Nicholas’ _Letters and Despatches of Lord Nelson_ is a mine of information from the operations at Toulon till 1805. Biographies of officers first become abundant at this period. Those which are of most value for the opening stage of the war are:—Burrows’ _Howe_, Ross’s _Saumarez_, Osler’s _Exmouth_, Tucker’s _St. Vincent_, Lady Bourchier’s _Codrington_; and for the operations in the West Indies, Collier Willyams’ special work on the subject, which is the basis of the account given by Bryan Edwards in his _History of the West Indies_.

When England was dragged into the war already raging between France and the German powers, against the wish of her rulers, and by the deliberate action of the revolutionary authorities in Paris on the 1st February 1793, she came in as the ally of all Central and Western Europe. By the spring of 1795 she was left to fight single-handed on the sea. The French armies had overrun Holland in January of that year. Prussia, hampered by an empty treasury and distracted by her anxiety to secure a share in the third partition of Poland, made peace at Bâle on the 5th April. Spain, weak, exhausted, and ill governed, was eager for peace. France, which had no cause to fear her and was anxious to withdraw the troops serving on the Pyrenean frontier, to reinforce the armies in Italy, on the Rhine, and in the Low Countries, gave her favourable terms. A treaty of peace, which was the preliminary to a treaty of alliance, was signed, also at Bâle, on the 22nd July. From the 1st February 1793 to the Franco-Spanish treaty of Bâle, 22nd July 1795, makes the first period of a war which was destined to last, with two brief intervals, for another twenty years. It was on both sides a struggle for existence. Revolutionary France fought to secure her new social order. To protect the gains of the Revolution, she strove to secure her “natural limits”—the Pyrenees, the Alps, the line of the Rhine. To guard herself against the hostility which this increase of power was sure to arouse in her neighbours, she had to gain possession of advanced guards and outlying fortresses to cover her new frontier, to subjugate Holland, and keep Spain in a dependence which must also include Portugal. But with the coast of Europe and its resources, from the Texel to the Maritime Alps, in the possession of France, the position of England would have been one of extreme danger. Therefore, in order that she herself might be safe, she had to endeavour to force France back into her old limits, and since France was resolved to secure her “natural limits” for her own security, she was committed to an endeavour to subjugate England. The fight could not end till one side was fairly beaten, and France was not vanquished, and shut once more within her frontier of 1790, till the Peace of Paris of the 20th November 1815 was signed. All Europe had to combine to bind her; for the causes which drove her to dominate Holland and Spain, as a defence against England, operated to compel her to seek other outworks and subdue other possible assailants beyond the Rhine and the Maritime Alps. In this mighty struggle of forces and principles it was the part of England to dominate the sea. Her strength on the sea made her the one power whom the French armies could not strike to the heart. Therefore she was the permanent enemy of France, the constant ally of her foes, and in the end the controlling member of the European Coalition which dictated the Treaty of Paris.

The part which England played was to herself glorious and profitable, and to Europe advantageous. It was also arduous. But the student of the history of the time, if he approaches the subject with a just determination to see it in a dry light and to judge by the evidence, must soon be convinced that if the nation was called upon to make great efforts and endure much, the burden was not imposed on it by the naval forces of its enemy. If we are to realise the real character of the task and estimate the true merit of the performance, we must first come to a sound understanding of the condition of the French fleet, which was our one serious opponent. The other navies thrown or dragged into the conflict served to do little more—if we put aside the gallant fight of the Dutch at Camperdown—than to multiply the number of posts which required to be watched, and so to add further severity to the already cruel strain of blockade.

When our squadrons began to get to sea in the summer of 1793, they found in front of them an enemy disorganised by four years of administrative destruction and attempted reconstruction, and morally ruined by four years of progressive anarchy.[1] The _ordonnance_ of Louis XIV. had never been honestly carried out. The _classes_ had been cruelly worked. The compensations promised to the seafaring population had never been given. Bad food, no pay, and nakedness were the lot of the sailors in the king’s ships. Therefore they hated the king’s service, and fled from it when they could. The State punished them by billeting soldiers on their families, and the outrages perpetrated by these men on the women and girls were notorious. It has been already said that the French officers of the regular, or grand, corps were nobles. Being nobles, they insisted on equality among themselves to the injury of discipline, and were perfectly insolent to all men who were not of their own class. None of the many ignorant things said of the French Revolution is more ignorant than the assertion that it gave Frenchmen their love of equality. What it did was to declare that all Frenchmen should be equal, and that there should be an end of the division of the people into nobles above, who were equal among themselves, and the _roture_, or non-noble, below, who also were equal among themselves. As the grand corps had never been sufficiently numerous to officer the fleet on a war footing, it had been found necessary to employ supplementary officers drawn from the merchant service. These men, who were known as the “blue officers,” because their uniform had not the red facings and knee-breeches of the grand corps, were not allowed to reach the higher ranks. They had to endure much impertinence.

It follows that no part of the French nation was better prepared to join the revolt against class privilege and in the demand for universal social equality than the sailors. A memory of long suffering and of bitter wrong rankled among the crews. Ulcerated pride, and the vanity which is peculiarly sensitive in the Frenchman and is easily driven to ferocity by wounds, exasperated the non-noble officers, and made them the natural leaders of revolt. In front of these elements of rebellion were the officers of the grand corps, very good sort of gentlemen individually in most cases, but even at their best quite unable to help showing their inbred hereditary conviction that they were of a finer clay than their comrades who were not of their class. It is a belief which can be shown with the most irritating insolence by an assumption of exact politeness.

In 1786 the Government had acknowledged the necessity for a change. The Marquis de Castries, then Minister of Marine, simplified the old ranks, and abolished the _Gardes de la marine_. He proposed to recruit the corps of officers in future by _élèves de la marine_, who might be of non-noble birth. But while breaking down the old exclusive rule, he still made a distinction. _Élèves_ who came from the schools of Vannes and Alais, which were confined to the nobles, could become lieutenants at once. All other _élèves_ had to pass through a rank of sub-lieutenant, and were therefore put at a disadvantage from the beginning. It was an excellent example of the kind of concession which provokes, and does not satisfy. When, in 1789, the king summoned the States General, he made a tacit confession that the absolute monarchy had brought France to financial ruin and administrative collapse, and could itself find no remedy. In fact, the monarchy abdicated, and the spontaneous anarchy of the Revolution broke out. It raged with extreme violence in the dockyards and the fleet. As early as March 1789 an outbreak, immediately provoked by the sufferings of the workmen and the sailors from the scarcity of that severe winter and bad harvest of 1788, took place at Toulon. Count d’Albert de Rions, _commandant de la marine_, was attacked, and nearly murdered. After the fall of the Bastille on the 14th July 1789, disorders broke out at Brest, and spread to Rochefort and L’Orient. The details need not be given here. The essential in all of them was that the workmen and sailors understood liberty and equality to mean that they were not to be ordered about by their old masters; that the stronger had the right to command, and that the nation was now the stronger; that the privileged corps were the natural enemies of the nation. The French Navy was well represented in the States General, or National Assembly, and many debates on it took place. In April 1790 a scheme of reorganisation was drawn up. It was in the main a sound one, and did in fact lay the foundation of the modern French Navy. But its details may be omitted, since years were to pass before it could even begin to be applied. The essential of the case here is that the General Assembly had to begin by reorganising the existing corps of officers; that it was in fear of a reaction and counter-revolution; that it distrusted the _civisme_, or loyalty to the Revolution, of the noble officers; that it dared not check the zeal of the workmen of the dockyards and the sailors; and when that zeal took, as it did from the first, the form of mutinous attacks on the Grand Corps, the Assembly did not venture to punish offenders who were its eager partisans. After each explosion of violence, it ordered an inquiry, and then decided that everybody concerned had acted from a good motive, including the unhappy officers who had been threatened with “the lantern,”—that is to say, the halter,—mobbed, kicked, and thrown into prison. The position of these officers became intolerable. The majority fled abroad, where they formed a regiment, in the emigrant army of Condé. It has been calculated that three-fourths of the old corps were lost to France. Those who remained included a few who were convinced partisans of the Revolution; others remained because their poverty gave them no means of escape. Admiral Trogoff de Kerlessi, the Breton noble who surrendered the ships at Toulon to Lord Hood in 1793, was one of these. But loyal or not loyal to the Revolution, they were alike oppressed and distrusted. The place of the emigrants was taken by men whose chief merit came to be their _civisme_, which was manifested by blatant pot-house oratory, self-assertion, and intrigue. The evil which the anarchy of 1789-93 did to the French fleet was not made good till the fall of the Empire. The inward and spiritual forces of discipline were killed. Even under the emperor, orders on such vital things as the gunnery drill of the crews were constantly met with outward and visible signs of neglect and disobedience. Perhaps because the best of the French nation does not naturally tend to the sea, it is also an undeniable fact that the French Navy produced no equivalent for the multitude of capable men from the ranks, and the non-commissioned officers, who replaced the emigrant aristocratic officers in the army. They had as good an opportunity on the water as on the land, but they did not come.

The old monarchy had left the Revolution the materials of a noble fleet. The calculation of James in his _Naval History_ is allowed to be sound. He puts the relative strength of the French and English navies in line-of-battle ships at

+---------+---------+---------+-------------+ | | Number | Number | Aggregate | | |of Ships | of Guns.| Broadsides. | +---------+---------+---------+-------------+ | English | 115 | 8718 | 88,957 | | French | 75 | 6002 | 23,057 | +---------+---------+---------+-------------+

The proportion in frigates was nearly two to one in our favour.

The Royal Navy was suffering from internal evils which broke out in 1797, but none of them were fatal, or beyond comparatively easy cure. In the interval between the Peace of 1783 and February 1793 three powerful fleets had been commissioned—in 1786, in consequence of the disturbed state of Holland; in 1790, on the prospect of a war with Spain—the Spanish armament; and in 1791, when intervention in the East appeared to be likely to become necessary. No fighting had ensued, but the efficiency of the dockyards had been tested. There was nothing to delay the vigorous use of the fleet in February 1793 except the old-standing difficulty always found in passing suddenly from a reduced peace establishment to a war footing, when the crews had to be collected by the press. It was, however, so serious that though Lord Howe, who was appointed to command the Channel fleet, “kissed hands” at court on his appointment on the 6th February, he did not leave London till the 27th May, and did not sail from St. Helens till the 14th July. An interval of six months, therefore, passed between the declaration of war and the appearance in home waters of the fleet which was to protect our shores. Lord Howe’s command was indeed not the first to be ready for service. France was to be attacked at three points—in the Channel, in the Mediterranean, and in the West Indies. The squadron appointed for the West Indies, and commanded by Sir John Jervis, was not able to sail till the very close of the year; but the Mediterranean fleet, under Lord Hood, sailed in detachments during April and May.

That it was safe to send Hood with his twenty sail of the line to the Mediterranean before the home fleet was ready is a signal proof that the Government felt it could rely on the disorganisation of the enemy to serve as our defence for a time. France had been at war since the previous year, and the contending portions of Girondins and Jacobins in Paris had alike been deliberately provoking a war with England. If they had been wise, they would have had a part at least of their fleet in a condition to act at once. But if wisdom can be attributed to the dominant elements in the National Assembly, the praise can be given only on the ground that a universal war was needed to confirm the triumph of the revolutionary parties. The ruin of their finances and the whirlwind of the social Revolution precluded all possibility of immediate effective action at sea. If we look only to the number of ships in commission and their distribution, France was in fairly good position to strike at once. There were three sail of the line and seven frigates at San Domingo, five frigates at Martinique, and two sloops at Cayenne. The Mediterranean fleet, recently reinforced from the Channel, consisted of eighteen sail of the line, sixteen frigates, and a number of small craft. In the Channel and on the Atlantic coast there were seven ships of the line at Brest, one at Cherbourg, three at the isle of Aix, together with seven frigates and other small vessels. The Vendéens were in arms for the king, and the authorities at Paris were well aware of the necessity for cutting them off from foreign support. On the 8th March, Admiral Morard de Galle, an officer of the old grand corps, was ordered to sea to cruise on the coast with three sail of the line. Bad weather drove him back to port, or served as an excuse for his return with his ill-appointed and mutinous ships. With feverish energy, and perhaps in the sincere though frantic belief that revolutionary energy would atone for the want of other elements of strength, the National Assembly commissioned fresh vessels, drove them to sea, and collected a squadron in Quiberon Bay under Villaret-Joyeuse. Morard de Galle took command of the whole on the 22nd May, seven days before Howe left London. By the 1st August he had with him nineteen sail of the line—four less than left St. Helens with Howe on the 14th July.

The operations in the Channel till the close of 1793 are without interest. Howe sighted the French hull down off Belleisle on the 31st July. Calms, squalls, and thick weather, the shyness of the enemy and the rawness of his own force, hastily manned and commanded by officers grown somewhat rusty in peace, combined to prevent an engagement. Till the close of the year the English admiral was either cruising in search of the enemy, and to protect trade, or was coming back to Torbay with sprung masts and split topsails to refit, and for stores. In November the French squadron of Vanstabel escaped his pursuit by sheer superiority of sailing due to the finer lines of their hulls and the more scientific cut of their sails. Morard de Galle did not dare to force an engagement. That he was outnumbered was a sound reason for avoiding battle. And he had still better cause in the state of his crews. Unpaid, unclothed, fed on insufficient rations of salted meat only, and infested by scurvy, they had good cause for discontent. A worse cause of weakness than even these paralysed him. The crews were in the full fever of revolutionary disorder, and had acquired a settled habit of mutiny. They were distrustful of the _civisme_ of their admiral, and maddened by the fear of treason. After many clamours, they forced their admiral to return to Brest on the 28th of September. The delegate of the National Assembly, Tréhouart, who accompanied the fleet, recognised the necessity for the return; but as usual the blame was laid on the want of _civisme_ of the chiefs. Morard de Galle was dismissed and imprisoned. Several captains were sent before the revolutionary tribunal, and most of them were put to death.

While the French were dismissing and beheading their officers, public opinion in England as represented by the Press, was condemning Howe. He was violently abused in the blackguard newspaper style of the time, and was ridiculed in highly coloured caricatures. One by Isaac Cruikshank shows “How a great admiral, with a great fleet, went a great way, was lost a great while, saw a great sight, and then came home for a little water.” The admiral chants piteously—

“Oh Lord when I get to Torbay, How folks will gape and stare; Are non come back the Lord knows how And been the Lord knows where.”

Another, drawn with the genius of Gillray, and inspired by all his brutality of rancour, shows Howe blinded by a shower of gold coins, and standing on a gold shell. He is saying, “Zounds! the damned hailstones hinder one from doing one’s duty. I cannot see out of my eyes for them. Oh it was just such another cursed peppering as this, that I fell in with on the coast of America in the last war, and a deuce of a thing it is, that whenever I am just going to play the devil I am either hindered by these confounded French storms, or else loose (_sic_) my way in a fog.”

Here we have the English counterpart of the French popular fury which doubted the _civisme_ of Morard de Galle and suspected him of treason. But the Government of England was strong, and upheld its admiral.

The contemporary operations in the Mediterranean began by a success which seemed to promise a speedy end of the war. By the middle of July Hood was on the coast of Provence with twenty-one sail of the line. He met the Spanish fleet at sea near to Iviça on the 6th, and found it in a miserably inefficient state. But the French fleet at Toulon was in a still worse condition than the Brest fleet. It had not dared to tackle even the feeble Spaniards. When orders were given to go to sea, the crews refused, saying that they were to be sold by treason, and would not sail in order to reach a foreign prison. The Admiral Trogoff de Kerlessi was a Royalist, whom his poverty alone had prevented from following other officers of his opinions into the emigration. The Royalists were strong in the south of France, though divided among themselves into those who wished the king to govern with the constitution of 1791, and those who aimed at the restoration of the absolute monarchy. The country was in open opposition to the Jacobin Government at Paris, and was bubbling with intrigue. Hood established a communication with the Toulonese Royalists through a Lieutenant Cooke, who was sent in on the pretext that he came to arrange an exchange of prisoners. Cooke, who has been erroneously described as a son of the discoverer, was afterwards killed as captain of the =Sybille= in her action with the _Forte_. On the 28th August the Toulonese were terrified by hearing that the Jacobin army which had just destroyed Lyons had occupied Marseilles, and was about to march on their own town. In the panic which the news caused, the Royalists combined to surrender the town, with dockyard and ships, to the English admiral, who was in co-operation with the Spanish fleet of Don Juan de Lángara, the officer who had been defeated and taken prisoner by Rodney in the relief of Gibraltar in 1780. In the course of the 28th and 29th they took possession. The sailors from Brest who were Jacobin in sympathy and the Jacobins in the town were over-awed.

The occupation of Toulon seemed to promise a speedy counter revolution in at any rate the south of France, or failing that, then the entire ruin of the French naval power in the Mediterranean by the permanent retention of the port. Both hopes were disappointed. Political causes which must be passed over here weakened the allies and their French friends. Toulon is a difficult town to defend on the land side. No sufficient force for the purpose could be collected by the allies. The Austrians would send no soldiers. The Spaniards who were sent proved untrustworthy. The Neapolitans, who came in some numbers, were worthless. The only solid elements in the garrison, the Piedmontese and the English soldiers, were too few. When, therefore, the Jacobin army was put under the command of Dugommier, an excellent officer, and its artillery was directed by Napoleon Bonaparte, who here first came conspicuously forward, it soon gained command of high ground from which it could bombard the harbour and render the anchorage untenable. On the 19th December Toulon was evacuated. The evacuation, which was complicated by the necessity for bringing away thousands of French refugees, was a scene of horror, and the preliminary to other scenes of horror when the Jacobins gained possession and took vengeance on their countrymen. Hood brought away as many of the French ships and as much of the naval stores as he could, and endeavoured to destroy the rest by fire. The task of destruction was entrusted to Captain Sidney Smith, who had joined the fleet as a volunteer in a small vessel purchased and armed by himself in the Levant. Smith, a very vapouring, but also a very stirring and quick-witted man, did his best, and made the most of what he did in his reports. The ill-will of the Spaniards, who perhaps wished to preserve a French naval force as a counterbalance to the English, and the rapid advance of the French, prevented the destruction from being thorough. Yet the allies carried off four sail of the line and burnt nine. They burnt fifteen frigates and carried off five. The English troops who might have prevented the retaking of Toulon were in Flanders under the Duke of York, or were about to sail to the West Indies in the expedition convoyed by Jervis, and commanded by Sir Charles Grey.

The war in the West Indies is one of the most instructive and interesting parts of the great revolutionary struggle. It was only begun by the capture of Martinique in 1794, and will be most conveniently dealt with as a whole, and together with the ancillary services of the navy. For the present I think it most convenient only to note that in April Santa Lucia and Guadaloupe, together with some smaller posts, were occupied. In June the arrival of French reinforcements at Guadaloupe gave an entirely new character to the war in this region. Only a few days before this expedition intervened, there had been fought in European waters the great battle which was to decide whether England was or was not to be free to continue her conquests in distant seas.

The fact that this expedition had sailed from Rochefort on the 25th April, unseen by British look-out ships, and had reached the West Indies before warning was given to Sir John Jervis, would seem to indicate some want of vigilance in the English blockading squadrons and look-out ships. The question whether the watch maintained on the French ports in the early stages of the war was well conducted has been much debated. Every reader of naval controversy has heard of the respective merits of the kind of blockade preferred by Howe, and the course followed by Jervis when he had become Earl St. Vincent and was in command in the Channel. Under St. Vincent the blockading fleet was expected to remain outside the enemy’s port in all seasons, save when the westerly gales drove the heavy ships to take refuge at Torquay, from whence they could return rapidly to their station when the wind shifted. During the absence of the heavy ships an inshore squadron of picked vessels remained at anchor on the French coast just outside of the range of French guns. Howe preferred to keep his ships at anchor in English ports, leaving frigates to watch the enemy, and report if they came to sea. The method of St. Vincent, which had been adopted before him by Hawke, imposed a very severe strain on both men and ships. Howe’s course was the milder, the more endurable to officers and crews. But it was open to the criticism that it allowed the enemy too good a chance of getting to sea unobserved, when it naturally followed that there was a difficulty in discovering what course he had taken, and in bringing him to action. On that ground alone St. Vincent’s blockade must be judged to be superior, and it had the further advantage that it tended to keep the fleet in better training though at a cruel cost to humanity. Yet we need not forget that even when St. Vincent’s rules were most strictly enforced, individual French ships and small squadrons did get to sea, while the torpor of their main fleet was deliberately enforced by the Government which had renounced the policy of meeting the English fleets in battle, and fitted out its own with no more aspiring ambition than the wish to impose a burden on England by forcing her to keep up trying blockades. It would be rash to assert that such a French expedition as that of 1794 would not have sailed successfully at any stage of the war.

The course of events in European waters during that year can hardly be quoted as a case in point against Howe’s method. It is true that he wintered in home ports, and did not sail from St. Helens till the 2nd May; but he was off Brest before the main French fleet was at sea, and if he did not remain outside that port the reason must be sought in the nature of the task set him. The French harvest of 1793 had been very bad, and this failure of the home supply of food was aggravated by the disorder of the country, which hampered industry. France was in serious danger of famine, and the Government had directed its diplomatic agent in the United States, M. Genêt, to purchase foodstuffs, hire American vessels, and send them to Europe in a convoy. On the 24th December 1793, Rear-Admiral Vanstabel sailed from Brest to act as escort to the trading-ships, with two sail of the line and four frigates. The French Government had given its cruisers an order to impound all food on its way to England in neutral vessels, and the British Government had retaliated by declaring all food designed for the use of Frenchmen to be contraband of war. When, therefore, Lord Howe sailed from St. Helens, his orders were to intercept the convoy. The French, who were aware that the British fleet would if possible stop the grain-ships, had sent Rear-Admiral Nielly to meet them with five sail of the line, 300 miles to the west of Belleisle. Nielly left Brest on the 10th April, the day before Vanstabel left the Chesapeake with his hundred and twenty grain-ships.

It is self-evidently true that if Howe had been outside Brest by the beginning of April, Nielly could not have sailed. But the British Government was in some anxiety for its own trade, and Howe was ordered to take with him nearly a hundred merchant-ships, which could not be collected sooner, and to see them clear of the Channel. The whole swarm of vessels which left the Isle of Wight with him amounted to 148 sail, of which 49 were men-of-war, and 34 were ships of the line. Howe took the convoy to the Lizard, and then sent the merchant-ships on under the protection of eight ships of the line. Six of these, under the command of Rear-Admiral Montagu, were ordered to accompany the convoy to Cape Finisterre, and then cruise between Cape Ortegal and Belleisle till the 20th, when they were to join the flag off Ushant. Two were to accompany the merchant-ships to their destination. Howe with twenty-six sail of the line and seven frigates steered for Brest to discover whether the main French fleet had put to sea. It was discovered at anchor.

This fleet, now commanded by Villaret-Joyeuse, a member of the old Royal Navy, and a comparatively young man, was within one of the same strength as the English—twenty-five sail of the line. Great exertions had been made by the French Government to fit it out thoroughly. Sailors had been brought from Toulon, and the crews were filled up by levies of landsmen. Every effort had been made to rouse the patriotism of the crews and confirm their confidence by eloquent appeals to their emotions. As a security that the officers would be kept up to the mark, and also as a precaution against the recurrence of the mutinous disorders which had disturbed the fleet of Morard de Galle, the Government had sent down two delegates with large powers of reward and punishment—Jean Bon Saint André, and Prieur de la Marne. The name of Jean Bon was freely used by wits in England as a Turk’s Head, or chopping-block for satire. They expatiated at large in prose and verse on his absurdities and cowardice. But Jean Bon was by no means an absurd man. He had been a sailor in his youth, before he became a Protestant preacher in his native town, Montauban. In the Convention he had been distinguished by Jacobin zeal and a great command of the windy rhetoric of the time. But he was neither fool nor coward. At a later period he did good service for Napoleon as Prefect at Mayence, and left the reputation of an honest and able official. His influence in the fleet was exercised on the side of energy, and his absurdities were superficial. If he dictated to the admiral, he had begun by making the crews understand that mutiny would no longer be tolerated. That Villaret-Joyeuse was better obeyed than Morard de Galle had been was mainly due to the presence of a representative of the dreaded Committee of Public Safety and to the decision of Jean Bon. The Republican fleet which lay at Brest in 1794 was in truth a better force than France was able to send to sea later in the war, when the spirit of the crews had been damped by defeat, when they had ceased to believe in the possibility of victory, and when long periods of stagnation in port had rendered them awkward and timid. It was indeed far from being efficient. Most of its captains and officers were merchant seamen who had no experience of naval military work. Its crews were largely landsmen. The Government was well aware of its want of training, for they instructed Villaret-Joyeuse to take the opportunity, afforded by his cruise for the protection of the convoy, to drill his men. They were to be taught the rudiments of their business at the very moment when they were about to meet an enemy. On the other hand, it must not be forgotten that the English officers had not yet reached the level of skill they attained later. Howe had to complain of the awkwardness of some of his captains. The proportion of men who were at sea for the first time in their lives was large in his fleet also. The “prime seamen,” impressed for the fleet in 1793, had been largely sent to the Mediterranean or West Indies. There were vessels under his command which counted but a low proportion of men bred to the sea in their complements. No doubt the level of skill was higher in the English than in the French ships. But the superiority of Howe’s force was not what the superiority of the crews of coming years was to be. It was based less on training than on a better spirit of discipline, and the quality of its cadastre of officers—commissioned, warrant, and petty. Defoe’s maxim that “good officers presently make a good army,” holds true of fleets, though, no doubt, more time is required to make a man useful in a ship than to drill a soldier.

When Howe saw the French at anchor on the 5th May he might have judged it wiser to remain off Brest, so as to prevent them from getting out to cover the arrival of the convoy. But he could have no security that the convoy would make for Brest, and if it had reached the French ports to the south while he was blockading Villaret-Joyeuse, the main purpose of his cruise would have been lost. He therefore stood to sea to seek for Vanstabel and his charge on and near the 47th degree of latitude—the course which would naturally be followed by merchant ships on their way to Europe. He remained sweeping the trade route without seeing a sail, till he came off Brest again on the 19th, to which he returned since he had ordered Admiral Montagu to meet him off Ushant on the 20th. The weather had been foggy, so foggy that on the 17th the French fleet, on its way out, had passed Howe’s ships close enough to let the Frenchmen hear the fog signals struck in the English fleet. The watch bell was tolled on the starboard, and a drum beaten on the port, tack. The English fleet did not detect the neighbourhood of the enemy, and on the 18th the fleets were out of sight of one another. Villaret-Joyeuse had left Brest on the 16th, and after so narrowly avoiding a collision, he steered for the west to meet Nielly at his rendezvous, three hundred miles west of Belleisle. Howe, on the 18th, was returning to the east, and on the 19th his frigates reconnoitred the anchorage and discovered that Villaret-Joyeuse was at sea. On the same day the =Venus= frigate joined him with important news from Montagu. On the 15th the rear-admiral had fallen in with and captured the French corvette, _Maire Guiton_, and several merchant vessels. They belonged to an English Newfoundland convoy protected by Captain Thomas Troubridge in the =Castor= frigate. The =Castor= and the vessels she was convoying had all fallen into the hands of Nielly, who had sent them off as prizes. Montagu learnt from the Englishmen in the crews of the recaptured ships, that Nielly was waiting to join Vanstabel. As their united force would have outnumbered his, he informed the admiral, and asked for reinforcements. Howe, who also knew that Villaret-Joyeuse was at sea, realised the danger that his detached squadron might be overwhelmed, and at once steered to the south-west to afford it protection. On the 21st he fell in with a number of Dutch merchant vessels, just captured by Villaret-Joyeuse, and retook them. From the men on board and the logs of the ships he learnt that the French admiral was steering to the west to meet Nielly, and in a direction which would carry him away from Montagu, who was therefore in no danger. The main English fleet went in search of the Frenchman. Montagu, for his part, came to the rendezvous off Ushant on the 20th, and, not finding Howe there, returned in a few days to the Channel, an act of weakness which he and his apologists endeavoured to justify, but which had no valid excuse. It was an oversight on the part of Lord Howe that he did not take measures to call Montagu’s six line-of-battle ships to his flag. If they had been with him in the coming battles the result could not well have failed to be more decisive.

From the 21st to the 28th of May, Howe was diligently seeking the French between the 47th and 48th parallels of latitude. On the morning of the 28th they were seen directly to the south of him, and to windward in the brisk south-westerly wind then blowing. Villaret-Joyeuse, who had been joined by the _Patriote_, 74, from the squadron of Nielly, had now exactly the same number of ships as Howe. When the English topsails were first seen by the French they were supposed to be perhaps the convoy or the ships of Nielly’s squadron. He therefore bore down till he was near enough to recognise the English fleet, which he did when it was separated from him by a space of ten miles. The first duty of the French admiral was to manœuvre to secure the safety of the convoy. The more effectual course would have been to force on a close battle and drive Howe away. Villaret-Joyeuse was far too painfully conscious of the defects of his command to take the bold line which would have commended itself to his old chief, Suffren, with whom he had served in the East Indies, but was contrary to the general tradition of the French Navy. Therefore, like the plover, which endeavours to draw the intruder away from the place where its nest is, the French admiral manœuvred to tempt his opponent away from the route of the grain-ships. There was in truth little risk that he would not be followed, to say nothing of the fact that it was impossible to know exactly where Vanstabel would be at a given moment. The wholesome tradition of our navy was to destroy the fighting force of the enemy. When his opponent was in front Howe fixed upon him. The operations of the following five days were performed in the space of the Atlantic stretching around the point 47° 34′ N. and 13° 39′ W., and to 47° 48′ N. and 18° 30′ W. A line drawn west from Belleisle, and another drawn south from Lion’s Bank in the North Atlantic, meet on the field of the operation of the 28th and 29th of May and the 1st of June.

When he knew that Howe was to leeward of him the French admiral ordered his fleet to come to the wind on the port tack, and stood to the westward, in the south-westerly wind. But the inexperience of his captains and crews prevented the quick formation of a good line. Some of his vessels fell behind and to leeward. A little after one o’clock he tacked his ships in succession—one after the other, each tacking where her leader tacked—came back to pick up and cover the isolated vessels, and then stood to south-east. When the French were seen the English fleet pressed to windward, and at a quarter to ten the signal was made to prepare for action. As it had to work to windward its approach was naturally slow, and the whole day might have passed without an encounter but for the bad handling of some of the French ships. As it was, the first shot was not fired till about half-past two. To tack a fleet of the size of the French, in succession, was an operation requiring some two hours for its due performance. The last of the line had not reached the turning point when the first of the English came within striking distance. At that moment the French were to the south-east and the windward of the English, and all, except the ships which had not returned, were heading to the east-south-east. Howe had told off a squadron of his best sailing ships to harass the enemy’s rear, seize hold of his skirt, as it were, and stop his attempt to get away. This squadron consisted of Rear-Admiral Pasley’s flagship, the =Bellerophon=, 74, Captain William Hope; the =Russell=, 74, Captain John Willet Payne; the =Marlborough=, 74, Captain the Hon. G. Cranfield Berkeley; and the =Thunderer=, 74, Captain Albemarle Bertie. Though the average speed of a French fleet was commonly better than our own, the quickest English ships sailed better than the slowest of the French. As Villaret-Joyeuse was compelled to keep his ships together he had to regulate his speed by that of the worst sailer among them. Admiral Pasley’s squadron would probably have overtaken him even if his evolution had been completed by half-past two. At the moment of the first intact the English fleet was heading to the westward towards the French rear. At about three o’clock, as the enemy completed his evolution, it also began to tack in succession, and to follow, still heading for the rear of Villaret-Joyeuse’s line, and still to leeward, in pursuit of the opponent who was slipping away to the eastward. The =Russell=, =Marlborough=, and =Thunderer=, with the frigates, held on longer than the others to get into the wake of the French, and then turned. Both fleets now stood eastward, the French ahead, while the leading English ships kept up a bickering fire with the end of their line. At about five o’clock the _Revolutionnaire_, 110, fell back from her place in the line and took post at the rear. Her great bulk and solidity fitted her to stand battering. Her captain, Vandongen, fought her stoutly and was killed in the action. As the darkness came on the _Revolutionnaire_ fell behind and put before the wind. She was engaged by the =Bellerophon=, the =Russell=, the =Thunderer=, the =Marlborough=, the =Leviathan=, 94, Captain Lord Hugh Seymour, and the =Audacious=, 94, Captain William Parker. She suffered severely, and it was believed in the English fleet that she had surrendered. It is probable that she would have been taken if Howe, who did not trust all his captains sufficiently to welcome a night action, had not recalled the ships engaged at about eight o’clock. She continued to be engaged on the =Audacious= till nearly ten. Captain Vandongen fell at nine-thirty. His first and second lieutenants had been killed or disabled. The third lieutenant, Renaudeau, was wounded immediately after taking over the command. The _Revolutionnaire_ staggered out of

## action a wreck, under her fourth lieutenant, Dorré. But she had put

her mark on most of the ships which engaged her, having damaged the =Bellerophon= severely, and shattered the rigging of the =Audacious= so thoroughly that the English 74 was compelled to put before the wind and return to Plymouth. The _Revolutionnaire_ reached Brest (where her officers and crew were sent to prison on a charge of treason) under the escort of the _Audacieux_, 74, from Nielly’s squadron, which joined Villaret-Joyeuse on the 29th but was detached to help her.

During the night the two fleets continued standing to the eastward on the starboard tack. Next morning the French were seen to windward, about six miles off, on the starboard bow of the English. The _Audacieux_ was standing across our route some distance ahead to join her admiral, who, as has just been stated, sent her off to help the _Revolutionnaire_. At seven o’clock Howe ordered his ships to tack in succession, and menace the rear of the enemy as on the day before. By this movement he also manœuvred to set to windward. At about eight o’clock the =Cæsar=, 74, and the =Queen=, 74, the leading ships of Howe’s line, now heading westward, began to cannonade the rear ships of the French who were still standing to the east. Villaret-Joyeuse, seeing his rear ships menaced, and being anxious lest some of them should be cut off as on the day before, wore his fleet in succession, turning them, that is to say, before the wind, and bringing them nearer the English. The result of this movement was to bring the French on to the same tack as the English, but nearer them though still to windward, and the two fleets stood on to the west, cannonading one another at some distance, for the French hung back from a close engagement. At half-past eleven Howe signalled to his fleet to tack in succession and pass through the enemy, but deciding, on consideration, that the order was premature he annulled it, and then repeated it at half-past twelve. The smoke made it difficult to see the order, and when it was seen it was ill obeyed. The leading ship of the English line, the =Cæsar=, was commanded by Captain Molloy, who had commanded the =Intrepid=, 64, in Graves’ action with Grasse, off the Chesapeake, in the previous war, and had then fought with signal gallantry. But in the actions of 1794 he suffered, according to his own account, from a persistent course of misfortunes, and, according to others, from a want of zeal, which brought on him great discredit in the fleet, and condemnation by a court martial. The =Cæsar= was too far from the enemy, and when she was ordered to tack, she wore, and so went further than before, running to leeward of her own friends. The =Queen=, 98, Captain John Hutt, the flagship of Rear-Admiral Alan Gardner, the ship next to the =Cæsar=, did tack and so did those immediately behind her, but partly because they were damaged in the rigging, and partly because the French line was well closed, they failed to break it at any point. They ran along it on the leeside between it and the centre and rear of the English fleet. The result of Howe’s manœuvre so far had been to throw his own fleet into confusion. Seeing that if he waited to tack till his turn came, he might be too late to reach the enemy, he tacked his flagship, the =Queen Charlotte=, 100, and broke through the French line ahead of the fifth ship from the rear. Then he tacked again and stood in the same direction as the French, who were now to leeward of him. He was followed by his fleet, but in a confused swarm. In the prevailing disorder and the smoke, the English could hardly tell whether their broadside would go into a friend or an enemy. Yet Howe gained the essential advantage he had aimed at. He forced to windward of the French fleet, and gained the weather gage. The two ships in the rear of the French line, the _Indomptable_, 80, Captain Lamesle, and the _Tyrannicide_, 74, Captain Dordelin, were cut off and surrounded. Seeing their peril Villaret-Joyeuse wore out of his line to support them. He was followed by the centre and rear of his fleet, and he rescued the two ships. He even threatened the =Queen=, which had been much mauled and had fallen behind. His van had followed him. The =Queen= was promptly supported. Both fleets were in much confusion, and at five o’clock the fire ceased.

The action of the 29th May had ended to the notable advantage of Howe. Though several of his ships were damaged, none were too disabled to serve. On the other hand Villaret-Joyeuse had lost the _Indomptable_, which was so much damaged that he felt constrained to send her home under escort of the _Mont Blanc_, 74. The _Montagnard_, 74, left the fleet without orders. The fleet which had sailed from Brest was therefore diminished by loss of four of its ships. Moreover, it had lost the weather gage, and with it the power to delay a decisive

## action. When the action of the 29th ended the French admiral wore

again, but his fleet on the port tack rejoined his van and stood to the west followed by the English fleet. The _Montagnard_, which had separated from the fleet, fell in with Admiral Vanstabel and the convoy. On the day following the action, the 30th May, Vanstabel, with his grain-ships, sailed across the water where it had been fought, and while Howe, who had come out to intercept him, and the Brest fleet, which was there for his protection, were sailing to the west, continued on his way to France.

The wind was still south-westerly, but it had diminished in strength. The weather became foggy, and the hostile fleets not only lost sight of one another, but it was often not possible for the ships in each to see their friends. On the 30th May Villaret-Joyeuse had a piece of extraordinary good fortune. He was joined by the _Trente-et-un Mai_, 74, Captain Honoré Ganteaume, from Concale, and by Rear-Admiral Nielly, with the _Sans Pareil_, 80, Captain Courand; the _Trajan_, 74, Captain Dumourier; and the _Téméraire_, 94, Captain Henry Morel. His fleet was therefore again brought up to twenty-six sail. During the 30th and 31st May the two fleets continued sailing to the west, sighting one another in glimpses through the fog. By the evening of the 31st the air had cleared. The French were then to leeward of the English at a distance of four or five miles. It was somewhat of a surprise to Howe’s officers to find their opponent undiminished in numbers and so little damaged. Howe, who was no more inclined than before to fight a night battle, and who knew that the French could not now get away, was content to continue on the same tack with them during the night. At dark they were on his lee quarter. When full daylight had come on the 1st June they had so far gained on him that they were on his lee bow.

The battle now about to be fought is among the most important in the history of naval war. Its significance is to some extent obscured by the fact that we see it in the perspective of time—that is to say, across subsequent events of an apparently greater order, with which we naturally, though unfairly, make our comparisons. But the just comparison is with what went before. I have endeavoured to show how the British admirals of the eighteenth century had been compelled, and were for the most part content, to fight on the poor model provided by the Duke of York’s Fighting Instructions. They bore down on the enemy from windward, engaged van to van, centre to centre, rear to rear. And they complied with Instruction XVI.: “In all cases of fight with the enemy the commanders of his majesty’s ships are to keep the fleet _in one line_, and (as much as may be), to preserve that order of battle, which they have been directed to keep, before the time of fight.” The result had been to produce such formal and inconclusive actions as were fought by Pocock and D’Aché in the East Indies, by Keppel and D’Orvilliers off Ushant, and in many other places. About the time of the American War of 1778-1783 a general impatience had begun to be felt with this established system. A witty French minister declared that what a naval battle meant was the meeting of two fleets, a great expenditure of powder and shot, and a separation—after which the sea was never a whit the less salt.

Arbuthnot’s action with Destouches off the Capes of Virginia, Parker’s fight with Zoutman on the Dogger Bank had exasperated the navy. Then came Rodney’s victory off Dominica, when he broke his own line in defiance of Instruction XVI. and with brilliant results. We cannot say with certainty how far the speculations of Clerk influenced the minds of naval officers. They have commonly denied him any influence at all. His ingenious plans for forcing on decisive actions are open to the criticism of Captain White, who, in his notes on Rodney’s battle, said that Mr. Clerk would not have found it so easy to manœuvre real ships on real water, as to move his models on the dining-room table. The late Rear-Admiral May, when Captain of the College at Greenwich, once observed to me, while looking at Clerk’s scheme for an attack on the enemy’s rear from windward, that it was very pretty if the enemy was fool enough to let you carry it out. There are no _bottes secrètes_ in war—no lunges which cannot be parried. Any attack is effective only when the better fighter tries it on the less good. And here we come to the root of the matter—to that dominating idea of Clerk’s book which remains sound whatever may be the value of his applications.

It is essential to know what that idea really was. I do not think that it is to be found in his ingenious plans for concentrating a superior number of ships on an inferior number of the enemy’s. Every such attempt to concentrate can be countered and baffled by an alert opponent. The real value of Clerk’s speculations lies in the truth of the hypothesis on which he reasoned, and the general recommendation, or exhortation, he founded thereupon. They are to be read in the introduction to his book on Tactics. He said to naval officers that they and their crews were superior in quality to their enemies, and had proved that superiority in single ship actions, yet their great battles had commonly led to no decisive result, and why? Because they allowed themselves to be tied by pedantic rules. These rules were useful to the side which wished to avoid a decisive action. To the stronger, who had every reason to wish for a chance to develop his strength, they were bonds and obstructions. Therefore, he urged, use your formation as a means of bringing your ships into action. Then it has served its purpose, and you can let it go, break into your enemy’s formation, and allow free play to your individual superiority. With or without his help, or spontaneously, and with stimulus from him, these opinions had been spreading in the navy. On the 1st June 1794 the time and the opportunity for their application had come. Howe’s claim to rank among the great captains is based on the fact that he did apply them.

He would hold his place, even if it could be shown that he did not do the best he could have done. The prevailing authorities are agreed that he did not, and the more friendly plead his sixty-eight years, and the strain which had been laid on him, as excuses. It had been severe since the 2nd May, and heavy indeed since the morning of the 28th. The obligatory remark that Nelson would have done far otherwise is rarely omitted. I shall not undertake to prove a negative. Being the younger man, Nelson might have had the strength to do more than Howe if he had ever met an opponent who had capacity and opportunity to manœuvre. Let us leave easy and barren assumptions aside, and see what were the facts with which Howe had to deal.

In the first place he knew, by his experience on the 29th, that the fleet on his lee-bow could and would manœuvre. Villaret-Joyeuse had shown, by wearing out of his line to extricate the _Indomptable_ and the _Tyrannicide_, that he was not the man to lie idle while part of his fleet was assailed by superior numbers. The French admiral was quite capable of countering any attempt at concentration. On the other hand, Howe could not rely on the intelligent execution of his orders by all his captains. The simpler the task he set them the better would it be executed. Then he knew that while the manœuvring power of the French was not contemptible, their gunnery was bad. The loss of life in his fleet had been small, and none of his ships had been so disabled on the 29th as to be unable to take her place in the line on the 1st June. Therefore it followed that so long as the ships of the two fleets were fairly matched in size, a superior power would be developed by each English ship by virtue of her better gunnery. What was required was that the action should be close, and that the enemy should not be allowed to practise the favourite French manœuvre of firing to dismast, and then slipping away to leeward. The end could be obtained by bearing down on the enemy, van to van, centre to centre, rear to rear, not for the purpose of hauling up to windward and then keeping in the same order, while the enemy went off on his open line of retreat, but to break in on him, to pass through his line, to cut his retreat, and so to force him to fight it out. The process of breaking through would give opportunities to rake the enemy’s ships, a _mêlée_ would be produced, and the individual superiority of the English ships would have free play. When Howe decided on this departure from tradition, he, with his sixty-eight years and his training in the strictest sect of the Pharisees, showed a greater daring, a greater originality, than was to be displayed by the men who followed him, who handled more practised fleets, who benefited by the confidence he had inspired, who fought enemies whose nerve he had broken. The battle of the 1st June was the foundation of the later superiority of the English fleet, and by far the most essential part of any building is its foundation.

Lord Howe signalled that he meant to attack the centre of the enemy’s line, and then that he would break through and engage to leeward. His line bore up at about a quarter-past eight, after a pause had been made to allow the men to have breakfast. The approach was slow, for the opportunity was taken to rectify the order of the ships so that they should be fairly matched. The course steered was to the north-west, the ships advancing on oblique lines to assail the enemy who was on their bow, and who lay in very good order awaiting the attack, in a line ahead from west to east. The wind, though less strong than on previous days, was still from the south-west, and the sea was calmer than it had been for the last few days.

It was nearly half-past nine when Howe’s fleet came within range of the French guns and the enemy opened fire. For a few moments none of his ships answered. They were waiting till they were in a position to answer with effect. If the admiral’s orders had been exactly obeyed each of his captains would have steered for the space astern of the Frenchman corresponding to himself in the hostile line, and would have passed through it, and would have engaged to leeward. But the order was not exactly obeyed, sometimes because the French closed their line and no open space was left; sometimes because the rapidly gathering cloud of smoke deprived zealous officers of the power to see; sometimes because an effective effort to obey was not made. The signal to pass through the enemy’s line was accompanied by a superfluous and mischievous note to the effect that the captain who could not find a place to pass was at liberty to engage without passing. It was superfluous, because there was surely no necessity to tell any man that he was not expected to do the physically impossible, and mischievous, because this official recognition of the alternative gave the weaker sort an excuse for not doing their utmost. There were those who did not. The =Cæsar= hauled up too far to windward, exposed herself to the concentrated fire of the leading French ships, was damaged, made distracted vacillating movements, was of no use, and yet suffered more loss of life than some vessels which really contributed to the victory. Following the line from west to east, the =Bellerophon= engaged the _Gasparin_ to windward, but close and hotly, till the Frenchman, together with his next ahead, the _Convention_, flinched, bore up and ran to leeward, heading to the east. The rigging of the =Bellerophon= was cut to pieces, and she could not follow. Yet she lost fewer men than the =Cæsar=. But Admiral Pasley, who lost his leg, was among the wounded. The =Leviathan= engaged the _America_ to windward to good purpose, pushing her hard, driving her out, following her, and swinging round to leeward of her as she strove to follow her leaders to the eastward. Old habit had fixed the French captains in the faith that a naval battle was to be fought by firing to dismast and then slipping away to form a new line to leeward. The =Russell= engaged the _Téméraire_ till this French ship also slipped away. Then she pressed on, and falling in with the _America_ helped to take her. The =Royal Sovereign= fought the _Terrible_, drove her out of the line, and then joined in overwhelming the _America_. The =Marlborough= broke through the French line astern of the _Impétueux_, the next behind the _Terrible_, became entangled with the former and the _Mucius_, her next astern, so that the three fell aboard one another, and the English ship was severely mauled. The =Defence= cut the line between the _Mucius_ and the _Eole_, suffering much. The =Impregnable=, =Tremendous=, and =Barfleur= engaged the _Tourville_, _Trajan_, and _Tyrannicide_ to windward—not as closely as Howe would have wished. The =Barfleur= was the flagship of Admiral Bowyer, who also was wounded, and her captain was Cuthbert Collingwood, the most calmly intrepid of men. No want of goodwill can have restrained him. In the smoke her crew could see only a short distance. They believed, and for a time Collingwood himself believed, that a French ship beside them had sunk. “Up jumped the Johnnies on the guns and cheered,” so Collingwood records, but they were mistaken. The =Culloden= and =Gibraltar= fired from windward, not closely, nor to the purpose. The =Queen Charlotte=, Howe’s flagship, was steered to break the line astern of the French flagship, the _Montagne_. As she came down she took the fire of the _Jacobin_ and the _Achille_, the next French vessels, without reply. The captain of the _Montagne_—or the Admiral Villaret-Joyeuse—understood her aim, backed their sails, and endeavoured to bar her road. Gassin, the captain of the _Jacobin_, saw it too, and, letting all draw, shot ahead to close the line. He took the officer-like course, but he took it too eagerly. The _Jacobin_ nearly ran into the stern of the _Montagne_, and to avoid a collision had to port her helm, and was carried on till she ranged up on the leeside of the flagship. The =Queen Charlotte= swept through the space left by her advance. The flag of the _Montagne_ flapped against the shrouds of the English flagship, so closely did she pass. Her broadside was delivered with shattering force, and then she ranged up between the _Montagne_ and the _Jacobin_. If either had been laid on her bow she must have suffered, if not disaster, still great injury. But the _Jacobin_ soon stood on, and then so did the _Montagne_, which had made little or no reply to the English fire. The =Brunswick= headed to pass through the gap left by the _Achille_ which had followed the _Jacobin_, but Captain Renaudin, of the _Vengeur_, stood on and barred the way. Then Captain John Harvey, of the =Brunswick=, obeyed the admiral’s signal in the spirit since in the letter he could not. He ran into the French ship, his three starboard anchors hooking the Frenchman’s port fore-shrouds and fore-channels. When his master, Mr. Stewart, asked if the anchors should be cut away he answered, “No, we have got her, and we will keep her.” The two ships turned before the wind, and drifted to leeward, grappled one to the other. The =Valiant=, the =Orion=, the =Queen=, the =Ramillies=, the =Alfred=, the =Montague=, all engaged to windward more or less closely—some of them notably rather less than more. The =Royal George= broke through between the _Républicain_ and the _Sans-Pareil_. The =Majestic= engaged to windward. The =Glory= broke in among the ships of the French rear, and the =Thunderer= passed behind the last of them, and so entered the mêlée.

These movements which must needs be told consecutively, were contemporaneous, or nearly so. As the French ships pushed on to close spaces ahead of them, a westerly movement was given to the line, and the English vessels furthest to the east had the greater distance to go and so came later into action. Though Howe’s orders were not fully obeyed the French formation was broken, and the English were mingled with the enemy’s vessels in confusion. Out of that confusion order was again evolved. The general movement to leeward carried most of the French clear, and among them the _Montagne_, which shook off the =Queen Charlotte=, crippled by the loss of her main topmast. When the two fleets were disentangled, Villaret-Joyeuse was able to form a line to leeward, but ten of his ships were surrounded by the English. He came gallantly back to their assistance and rescued four, the _Républicain_, the _Mucius_, the _Scipion_, and the _Jemmapes_. Two of the English ships were put in peril by his return—the =Queen=, which had eagerly pushed through the broken French rear, and the =Brunswick=, which had drifted away locked to the _Vengeur_. Their strife was furious, and carried to a decisive conclusion. Captain Harvey was mortally wounded, but the _Vengeur_, shattered by the fire of the =Brunswick= and other English vessels, sank, carrying part of her crew down with her, but not before she had surrendered.

The return of Villaret-Joyeuse alarmed the captain of the fleet, Sir Roger Curtis, and he urged the admiral to call his ships about him lest the Frenchman should take his revenge. Howe, so exhausted by four days of strain that he nearly fell from fatigue, yielded to his importunity. The English ships were recalled, and before two o’clock the action ceased. We remained in possession of six prizes, the _Sans-Pareil_, _Juste_, _America_, _Impétueux_, _Northumberland_, and _Achille_. The total loss of life from the 28th May to the 10th June was but 290 killed. The wounded were 858. The casualty list of the six French ships taken was greater—1266 in all, and the total loss must have been very much heavier.

The operations of the campaign did not end when the fleets drew apart on the afternoon of the 1st June. Admiral Montagu was not allowed to remain in Plymouth Sound. When the =Audacious= brought news on the 3rd June that the fleets were in contact, he was ordered out again, and he sailed on the 4th with nine sail of the line. On the 8th June he was off Brest where he found himself in the midst of enemies. A reserve squadron had been fitted out in the port, and two at sea. It was weaker than Montagu’s, and retired before him to Bertheaume Bay. But on the 9th the fleet of Villaret-Joyeuse, diminished, but still formidable to Montagu’s squadron of nine, hove in sight. He slipped between the two, and retreated to Plymouth where he anchored on the 12th. In the meantime, Vanstabel, who, after crossing the scene of the action of the 29th May, had anchored at Penmarch, came into Brest under cover of the French fleet, and the great food convoy was safely housed. The main English fleet made for home when it lost sight of the French on the 1st of June. Part of the ships were left at Plymouth, but the majority and the prizes anchored at Spithead on the 13th of June.

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