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Updated: June 18, 2025
By this time, the leading ship of these two frigates was within a cable's-length of us, just luffing up sufficiently to give our weather-quarter the necessary berth. "By George, Miles," Marble said, as he stood at my side, watching the movements of the stranger, "that second frigate is the Speedy! I know her by the billet, and the distance of her bridle-port from her head.
"The signals are made and answered, sir," said Cornet, as soon as he had advanced to the edge of the table, on which the rear-admiral's elbow was leaning. "The Dublin is already in our wake, and the Elizabeth is bearing down fast on our weather-quarter; she will bring herself into her station in ten minutes."
This vessel, remarkable, as the commander-in-chief had observed, for never being out of the way, was not long in closing, though as she luffed up on the admiral's weather-quarter, to pass to windward, she let go all her top-sail bowlines, so as to deaden her way, making a sort of half-board.
In a few minutes, however, the Warspite signalled the admiral, to report the stranger on her weather-quarter, and, not long after, the Active did the same. Still neither told his character; and the course being substantially the same, the unknown ship approached but slowly, notwithstanding the unusual quantity of sail she had set.
This was no sooner done than we heard a prodigious flounce in the water, at but a small distance from the ship, on the weather-quarter; and after a violent noise, or cry in the air, the cloud, that upon our firing dissipated, seemed to return again, but by degrees disappeared.
The Elizabeth followed, clearing the flag-ship by merely twenty fathoms, and receiving a similar order. The Druid had been on the admiral's weather-quarter, but she now came gliding down, with the wind abeam, taking room to back her top-sail under the Cæsar's lee-bow.
Glad enough were we, when she had got so far ahead as to bring us well on her weather-quarter, though we did not dare set our sail again, until her dark, glistening hull, with its line of frowning ports, was shut up in the cloud of mist, leaving the spot on the ocean where she had last been seen, as if she were not.
She was falling more under a quarter-raking fire, too, from her people's losing command of their ship; the two frigates having, some time before, come by the wind the Englishman a little on the Frenchman's weather-quarter.
We made the Falkland Islands, or West Falkland rather, just as the sun rose, one morning, bearing a little on our weather-quarter, with the wind blowing heavily at the eastward. The weather was thick, and, what was still worse, there was so little day, and no moon, that it was getting to be ticklish work to be standing for a passage as narrow as that we aimed at.
Suddenly he reappeared at the companion, and with a serious countenance remarked: "I say, Harry, lad, I s'pose there's no chance of that devil," with a jerk of the thumb in the direction of our weather-quarter "getting a sniff of our dinner, and making sail in chase, is there?"
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