On the 3rd of September, Iberville anchored before Port Nelson. Anxiously, for two days, he scanned the sea for the rest of his fleet. On the morning of the fifth, the peaked sails of three vessels rose above the offing. Raising anchor, Iberville hastened out to meet them, and signaled a welcome. No response signaled back. The horrified watch at the masthead called down some warning. Then the full extent of the terrible mistake dawned on Iberville. These were not his consort ships at all. They were the English men-of-war, The Hampshire, Captain Fletcher, fifty-two guns and sixty soldiers; The Dering, Captain Grimmington, thirty guns and sixty men; The Hudson’s Bay, Edgecombe and Smithsend, thirty-two guns and fifty-five men—hemming him in a fatal circle between the English fort on the land and their own cannon to sea.
One can guess the wild whoop of jubilation that went up from the Englishmen to see their enemy of ten years’ merciless raids, now hopelessly trapped between their fleet and the fort. The English vessels had the wind in their favor and raced over the waves all sails set like a war troop keen for prey. Iberville didn’t wait. He had weighed anchor to sail out when he thought the vessels were his own, and now he kept unswervingly on his course. Of his original crew, forty were invalided. Some twenty-five had been sent ashore to reconnoiter the fort. Counting the Canadians and Indians taken on at Newfoundland, he could muster only one hundred and fifty fighting men. Quickly, ropes were stretched to give the mariners hand-hold over the frost-slippery decks. Stoppers were ripped from the fifty cannon, and the batterymen below, under La Salle and Grandville, had stripped naked in preparation for the hell of flame and heat that was to be their portion in the impending battle. Bienville, Iberville’s brother, swung the infantrymen in line above decks, swords and pistols prepared for the hand-to-hand grapple. De la Potherie got the Canadians to the forecastle, knives and war hatchets out, bodies stripped, all ready to board when the ships knocked keels. Iberville knew it was to be like those old-time raids—a Spartan conflict—a fight to the death; death or victory; and he swept right up to The Hampshire, Fletcher’s frigate, the strongest of the foe, where every shot would tell. The Hampshire shifted broadsides to the French; and at nine in the morning, the battle began.
The Hampshire let fly two roaring cannonades that ploughed up the decks of The Pelican and stripped the French bare of masts to the hull. At the same instant, Grimmington’s Dering and Smithsend’s Hudson’s Bay circled to the left of the French and poured a stream of musketry fire across The Pelican’s stern. At one fell blast, forty French were mowed down; but the batterymen below never ceased their crash of bombs straight into The Hampshire’s hull.
Iberville shouted for the infantrymen to fire into The Dering’s forecastle, to pick off Grimmington if they could; and for the Canadian sharp-shooters to rake the decks of The Hudson’s Bay.
For four hours, the three-cornered battle raged. The ships were so close, shout and counter-shout could be heard across decks. Faces were singed with the closeness of the musketry fire. Ninety French had been wounded. The Pelican’s decks swam in blood that froze to ice, slippery as glass, and trickled down the clinker boards in reddening splashes. Grape shot and grenade had set the fallen sails on fire. Sails and mastpoles and splintered davits were a mass of roaring flame that would presently extend to the powder magazines and blow all to eternity. Railings had gone over decks; and when the ship rolled, only the tangle of burning débris kept those on deck from washing into the sea. The bridge was crumbling. A shot had torn the high prow away; and still the batterymen below poured their storm of fire and bomb into the English hull. The fighters were so close, one old record says, and the holes torn by the bombs so large in the hull of each ship that the gunners on The Pelican were looking into the eyes of the smoke-grimed men below the decks of The Hampshire.
For three hours, the English had tacked to board The Pelican, and for three hours the mastless, splintered Pelican had fought like a demon to cripple her enemy’s approach. The blood-grimed, half-naked men of both decks had rushed en masse for the last leap, the hand-to-hand fight, when a frantic shout went up!
Then silence, and fearful confusion, and a mad panic back from the tilting edges of the two vessels with cries from the wounded above the shriek of the sea!
The batteries of The Hampshire had suddenly silenced. The great ship refused to answer to the wheel. That persistent, undeviating fire bursting from the sides of The Pelican had done its work. The Hampshire gave a quick, back lurch. Before the amazed Frenchmen could believe their senses, amid the roar of flame and crashing billows and hiss of fires extinguished in an angry sea, The Hampshire, all sails set, settled and sank like a stone amid the engulfing billows. Not a soul of her two hundred and fifty men—one hundred and ninety mariners and servants, with sixty soldiers—escaped.
The screams of the struggling seamen had not died on the waves before Iberville had turned the batteries of his shattered ship full force on Smithsend’s Hudson’s Bay. Promptly, The Hudson’s Bay struck colors, but while Iberville was engaged boarding his captive and taking over ninety prisoners, Grimmington on The Dering showed swift heel and gained refuge in Fort Nelson.