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Nelson, the instant he got his orders, detached to the spot an eighty-gun ship, to which he added four other cruisers, thinking, as he said in his orders to the captain selected, that "this is a service of the highest importance, and that an officer of your rank and experience should be employed therein."
The Fortitude was a small seventy-four, but well manned. The Princess Amelia was an old eighty-gun ship, with reduced metal and masts.
In its very first encounter with the English on March thirteenth the fleet successfully manoeuvered and just saved a fine eighty-gun ship, the Ça Ira, from capture by Nelson.
Still the frigate stood on till a three-decker an eighty-gun ship three seventy-fours, four frigates, and three brigs were counted. The little English frigate paraded up and down before the roadstead, but none ventured out to attack her. It was the French squadron under Admiral Allemand.
The other three having received flesh wounds, soon returned to their duty. The surgeon examined my ear, and found the tympanum ruptured. It destroyed my hearing on that side for ever, and for years after I was distressed with a loud roaring noise on the left side of my head. A fortnight later we fell in with a Spanish eighty-gun ship, a large frigate and a heavy-armed store ship.
The English had the same number of ships of the line and one fifty-gun ship, carrying 1012 guns and 8068 men. The English ships were all seventy-fours; the French had three eighty-gun ships, and one three-decker of one hundred and twenty.
By this time the Captain's rigging was all shot away; and she lay unmanageable abreast of the eighty-gun ship, the San Nicolas. Nelson seized the opportunity to board, and was himself among the first to enter the Spanish ship.
While I was serving on board her we had a desperate action with a French eighty-gun ship, the Couronne, when we lost thirteen killed, and many more wounded, but succeeded in beating her off and putting her to flight. Peace came soon after this, and five years passed before I obtained my warrant as boatswain.
A favorable opportunity soon occurred, one of those which so often show that, if a man only puts himself in the way of good luck, good luck is apt to offer. At 8 A.M. the eighty-gun ship "Ça Ira," third from the rear in the French order, ran on board the vessel next ahead of her, and by the collision lost her fore and main topmasts.
The ship-of-war was bringing up the breeze with her, and came along fast, and ere long the captain was able to declare that she was British. As she approached they found that she was the Tigre, an eighty-gun ship captured some time before from the French. When she came near she fired a gun across the bows of the brig, which at once lowered her sails.
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