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Updated: June 11, 2025
"However, bear a hand; we have plenty of work before us. There are two seventy-fours. We must destroy them by some means or other." When, however, they reached the seventy-fours, they found them full of French prisoners, who seemed inclined to protect them. "Very well, gentlemen," shouted Sir Sydney; "it will be a painful necessity to have to burn you in the ships!"
It has ever been the custom to spend almost any amount of money in repairing a captured vessel, in order that she may long survive to commemorate the heroism of the conqueror. Thus, in the English Navy, there are many Monsieurs of seventy-fours won from the Gaul. But we Americans can show but few similar trophies, though, no doubt, we would much like to be able so to do.
Now look at me; I was on the books of the Catamaran, one of the old seventy-fours, in '96; I did my duty then and always; was never in the black book or laid up sick; was always rough and ready for any work that came to hand; and when I went into the Mudlark as lieutenant in year '9, little Bobby Howard had just joined the old Cat. as a young middy. And where am I now? and where is Bobby Howard?
The French squadron consisted of two seventy-fours, one sixty-four, one fifty, one forty-four, and two of thirty-two guns. On the 21st of October, early in the morning, the Dreadnought made the signal for the enemy. On this, Captain Forrest summoned his captains, and on their arrival on the Augusta's quarter-deck, he observed, "Well, gentlemen, you see they are come out to engage us."
"Egad, it was like Byng and Galissoniere!" cried Chaplain Sampson, as Harry talked over the night's transactions with his tutor next morning. "No power on earth, I thought, could have prevented those two from going into action!" "Seventy-fours at least both of 'em!" laughs Harry. "But the Baroness declined the battle, and sailed out of fire with inimitable skill." "Why should she be afraid?
Two of the Spanish ships dropped astern to escape the tremendous fire of the three British seventy-fours, but they only fell in with the Excellent coming up to support the Captain, and she poured so tremendous a fire into them both that one of them struck at once.
As for myself, I anticipated a merry meeting with the many copper-coloured dignity ladies I formerly knew, provided the land-crabs had not feasted on their delicate persons. In the afternoon we gave a long, lingering look at the fleet, and parted company with two other seventy-fours who were in the same scrape.
But though this movement produced the immediate effect which was designed, it led to ill consequences, which Nelson foresaw, but for want of sufficient force was unable to prevent. His squadron was too small for the service which it had to perform. He required two seventy-fours and eight or ten frigates and sloops; but when he demanded this reinforcement, Admiral Hotham had left the command.
No less than three of the latter escaped without a man killed, while of the French only one. The kernel of the action seems to have been in the somewhat fortuitous concentration of two French seventy-fours and one sixty-four on an English seventy-four and sixty-four.
"The enemy formed a semicircle around us," wrote Suffren's chief of staff, "and raked us ahead and astern, as the ship came up and fell off with the helm to leeward." The two seventy-fours were crushed under this fire. Both lost their main and mizzen masts in the course of the day, and the foretopmast of the flagship also fell.
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