First of these the Torbay, Commodore Keppel’s ship, a smart and powerful seventy-four, ranged alongside. Setting-to briskly by himself, Keppel gave the Frenchmen a cruelly trying quarter of an hour, after which the Resolution and the Swiftsure, both seventy-gun ships, drew near to take their part. Keppel, according to his own log, “had silenced her,” and without waiting to see her colours come down, as the new arrivals neared the spot he moved off, intent on finding a single-handed fight for himself further ahead.
Keppel did so immediately, and settled the fate of the hapless Thesèe, a seventy-four, the same size as his own ship, which went to the bottom with awful suddenness as they were fighting yard-arm to yard-arm, struck by a fierce squall that burst on her and heeled her over just as she had opened her lower-deck ports to leeward in order to give the Torbay a broadside. Swamped by a tremendous sea, the luckless Thesèe filled and sank like a stone. Out of eight hundred men on board, not twenty in all were saved, picked up from floating wreckage. The Torbay herself narrowly escaped sharing the Thesèe’s fate. Her lower-deck ports had just been opened too. “Keppel’s,” relates Horace Walpole, “was full of water, and he thought he was sinking; a sudden squall emptied his ship, but he was informed all his powder was wet. ‘Then,’ said he, ‘I am sorry I am safe.’ They came and told him a small quantity was undamaged. ‘Very well,’ said he, ‘then attack again.’”
The Resolution and Swiftsure were in turn joined by the Revenge, and then the Essex added herself to the long suffering Formidable’s foes. Still, though, the Formidable kept her colours flying, while shot after shot—at intervals—came sullenly from her tiers of ports. She was practically silenced, but not as Keppel had thought, absolutely. There was little satisfaction in such odds, and three of the British ships moved away, leaving the Resolution to finish the business off.
HAWKE’S VICTORY IN QUIBERON BAY
Painted by Swaine. Engraved and Published in 1760.
The picture shows the “Royal George” (in the centre) sinking the “Superbe,” and the “Formidable” (immediately beyond the “Superbe” and in the background) lowering her colours to the “Resolution” (the ship coming up astern of the “Royal George”)
The Formidable was plainly at her last gasp, as it were; a wreck above and below, her masts down and her rigging lying in tangled heaps of torn canvas and cordage over the side, the bulwarks shattered to the level of the deck, the hull gashed with gaping holes from which streams of sea water spouted in cascades at every roll of the ship. Still, with all that, her gallant first lieutenant, the sole surviving naval officer on board, would not give in. The Formidable was a flagship, he declared, and, as a point of honour, to a flagship only should she strike. Manning what guns he could, he made his final effort to hold out just a little longer. It was magnificent, but it was hardly war. It was heroic, but it proved impossible. The gallant young Frenchman’s ambition was destined not to be realized. There was no time for it. The big Royal George, with Hawke’s blue flag flying out at the main, could be seen approaching, but she was not yet quite alongside. Before the Royal George could challenge, the deadly fire of the Resolution’s guns had done its work, and all hope of further resistance was at an end. Yet another British ship also, the Burford, was fast approaching the scene, intent apparently on joining in with the Resolution. It was hopeless now to wait for the Royal George, and the heroically defended ensign of the Formidable had to come down. The Formidable lowered her colours to the Resolution—exactly at five minutes to four o’clock.
Towards the end, Conflans himself in the Soleil Royal, with de Beauffremont and one of his captains, tacked and doubled back as if to the rescue of the Formidable, but they were too late.
What took place elsewhere on the scene of battle, during the short three-quarters of an hour that the waning daylight of the stormy winter’s afternoon lasted, before the fighting had of necessity to cease, are beyond our limits. How, for instance, the master of the Royal George, getting anxious about the reefs and sandbanks that showed up amid the breakers on either side as they surged ahead into the fight, declared that he dared not take the big three-decker further inshore, and drew from Hawke’s lips the heroic words, “You have done your duty in pointing out the danger; now go on and lay me beside the French Admiral!”; how the Royal George herself after that came within an ace of shipwreck as she fought; of the catastrophe to the French Superbe, sent to the bottom in attempting to keep the Royal George from closing with her flagship, by one terrific broadside from the Royal George, to the horror of the British flagship’s crew themselves as the smoke of the guns blew off and they saw three topmasts disappear under water, “in a hideously sudden manner,” where thirty seconds earlier had floated a noble man-of-war; how finally Conflans himself sheered off before the Royal George’s guns, and ran away to wreck his flagship and burn her next morning:—to recount in detail these and the many other dramatic incidents of that “thunderous miscellany of cannon and tempest,” as Carlyle called the battle of Quiberon Bay, are beyond our present scope.