Says the Shan Van Voght.
Again we are on the coast; by Donegal Bay. It is the morning of Friday, the 12th of October, ’98, between seven and eight o’clock. Eager-faced, excited watchers line the crags of Bloody Foreland. From the wide, flat expanse of sea below comes up on the wind the dull, heavy, throbbing sound of a distant cannonade. It has been getting nearer since daybreak. It now comes nearer and nearer still; and by degrees, from the direction of Tory Island, on the horizon over yonder, where a grey rolling cloud of powder-smoke lies heavy over the sea, two squadrons of men-of-war, two straggling lines of ships, most of them firing fiercely, come dimly into view. One is assuredly the long-looked-for French—Commodore Bompart’s squadron from Brest, bringing three thousand French soldiers and Wolfe and Matthew Tone. They were to have landed at Lough Swilly yesterday and raised the country-side. The other is the English fleet—a British squadron that has followed round from Cawsand Bay under press of sail to look after M. Bompart. They picked up news of him off the Fastnet and Achill Island, and pushed on here. On the previous day at noon—as we learn later on—off Malin Head in a stiff north-westerly gale, the British look-outs sighted the French squadron; and they have been working to bring Monsieur Bompart to battle ever since.
It looks likely to go hard with the French. At the last moment a mishap checked their attempt to give the British the go-by. Their best ship, the Hoche, a fine 80-gun two-decker, and M. Bompart’s own flagship, got disabled in a squall last night. Her maintopmast carried away, bringing down with it the main and mizen top-gallant masts and tearing a gaping rent in the mainsail. So Sir John Borlase Warren, the British Commodore, has been able to get level with his enemy, on whom he is now tacking to bring the fight to close quarters, in conditions where his superior force—three line-of-battle ships and five frigates to one line-of-battle ship, eight frigates, and a schooner—ought to decide M. Bompart’s fate before dinner-time.
Eleven o’clock. The inevitable has happened. The Frenchmen have been overpowered at all points and broken up. The French Commodore is now only holding out as long as possible pour l’honneur du pavillon. In the centre of the battle, a dismantled wreck, with the scuppers running blood at every heave of the vessel on the swell, lies M. Bompart’s flagship, the hapless Hoche. Three British ships together—a sixty-four and two frigates—are pouring broadside after broadside into her without ceasing for a moment.
Wolfe Tone, the story goes, was on board the Hoche, and refused at the outset a chance that was offered him to get away by a boat to the Biche, a fast-sailing schooner then about to make off, or to one of the French frigates, by which means alone it was possible for him to escape. “The action is hopeless,” said the French officers to him on the quarter-deck; “with the odds against us it can only have one end. We shall be prisoners of war; but what will become of you?” “No!” replied Tone. “Shall it be said that I fled when the French were fighting the battle of my country? No; I shall stand by the ship.” He went below and took charge of a division of guns in one of the batteries.
The end, as the watchers on land soon see, comes swiftly. Further resistance would be murder. Beaten to a standstill, riddled like a sieve, with twenty-five guns disabled, more than half her men put hors de combat, her lower masts shot through and every moment threatening to go over the side, her rudder smashed to splinters, with five feet of water in the hold—down perforce has to come the Hoche’s tricolor. So the battle ends.
OUR FIRST DONEGAL
The captured French line of battle ship “Hoche,” being towed by the “Doris,” 36, Lord Ranelagh, into Lough Swilly. Drawn by N. Pocock, from a sketch made from the “Robust” by Captain R. Williams of the Marines.
It is just twenty minutes past eleven. Three other French ships, overtaken at their first attempt at flight, have already surrendered. The rest are making off, scattering over the horizon with British frigates in pursuit, to be run down and taken in the end—all of them except two.[11]