Du Guay-Trouin had now recovered his breath. Again the bellying canvas of the St. Jacques des Victoires bore her down upon the Delft, and again the two war-dogs wrapped in deadly embrace. Hear the invincible Frenchman’s own account of the final assault:
“With head down,” he writes, “I rushed against the redoubtable Baron, resolved to conquer or to perish. The last action was so sharp and so bloody that every one of the Dutch officers was killed or wounded. Wassenaer, himself, received four dangerous wounds and fell on his quarterdeck, where he was seized by my own brave fellows, his sword still in his hand.
“The Faluere had her share in the engagement, running alongside of me, and sending me forty men on board for reinforcement. More than half of my own crew perished in this action. I lost in it one of my cousins, first Lieutenant of my own ship, and two other kinsmen on board the Sans-Pareil, with many other officers killed or wounded. It was an awful butchery.”
But at last he had won, and the victorious pennon of the Privateer fluttered triumphant over the battered hulks which barely floated upon the spar-strewn water.
“The horrors of the night,” he writes, “the dead and dying below, the ship scarcely floating, the swelling waves threatening each moment to engulf her, the wild howling of the storm, and the iron-bound coast of Bretagne to leeward, were all together such as to try severely the courage of the few remaining officers and men.
“At daybreak, however, the wind went down; we found ourselves near the Breton coast; and, upon our firing guns and making signals of distress, a number of boats came to our assistance. In this manner was the St. Jacques taken into Port Louis, followed in the course of the day by the three Dutch ships-of-war, twelve of the merchant ships, the Lenore, and the two St. Malo privateers. The Sans-Pareil did not get in till the next day, after having been twenty times upon the point of perishing by fire and tempest.”
Thus ended the great fight of Rénee Du Guay-Trouin, whose blood, you see, was quite as blue as his breeches.
“Again,” wrote His Majesty the King, “do I offer you a commission in the Royal Navy, Du Guay-Trouin. Will you accept? This time it is a Captaincy.”
“I do,” replied little Rénee,—quite simply—and, at the next dinner of the officers of the Royal Marines, they sang a chorus, which ran: