[203] Weather quarter is behind, but on the windward side.
[204] April 29, 1781, off Martinique, twenty-four ships to eighteen; January, 1782, thirty to twenty-two; April 9, 1782, thirty to twenty.
[205] The difference of time from Trincomalee to the Saints is nine hours and a half.
[206] The account of the transactions from April 9 to April 12 is based mainly upon the contemporary plates and descriptions of Lieutenant Matthews, R.N., and the much later "Naval Researches" of Capt. Thomas White, also of the British Navy, who were eye-witnesses, both being checked by French and other English narratives. Matthews and White are at variance with Rodney's official report as to the tack on which the English were at daybreak; but the latter is explicitly confirmed by private letters of Sir Charles Douglas, sent immediately after the battle to prominent persons, and is followed in the text.
[207] Letter of Sir Charles Douglas, Rodney's chief-of-staff: "United Service Journal," 1833, Part I. p. 515.
[208] De Grasse calls this distance three leagues, while some of his captains estimated it to be as great as five.
[209] The French, in mid-channel, had the wind more to the eastward.
[210] The positions of the French ships captured are shown by a cross in each of the three successive stages of the battle, B, C, D.
[211] The distance of the weathermost French ships from the "Ville de Paris," when the signal to form line-of-battle was made, is variously stated at from six to nine miles.
[212] The other two French ships taken were the "Ville de Paris," which, in her isolated condition, and bearing the flag of the commander-in-chief, became the quarry around which the enemy's ships naturally gathered, and the "Ardent," of sixty-four guns, which appears to have been intercepted in a gallant attempt to pass from the van to the side of her admiral in his extremity. The latter was the solitary prize taken by the allied Great Armada in the English Channel, in 1779.