De la Clue sent off an urgent appeal for reinforcements, and in response five fresh ships of the line and a frigate were despatched from Toulon, in charge of the Marquis du Quesne, Chef d'Escadre, or, as we call the rank, Commodore. With these additional ships De la Clue would have the same numbers exactly as his adversary, and should, the French considered, be able to fight his way out. The Toulon ships sailed for Carthagena on the 25th of February with the idea of running the gauntlet of the blockading fleet and joining M. de la Clue at night. Again, however, Admiral Osborn was forewarned of the enemy's approach, and his look-out frigates did their work. Two of the French ships, pushing ahead of the others, managed, during the night of the 27th of February, to get past the British scouting frigates off Cape Palos and turn into Carthagena unseen, but the main French force, three ships of the line and the frigate, were caught in the act.
Soon after daybreak on the 28th of February—a bright, clear morning—the British frigate Gibraltar, cruising some twenty leagues north-east of Cape Palos, spied four strange sail away on the horizon to the north-east of her. The Gibraltar's signals were repeated by the St. George and the Culloden and then Admiral Osborn ordered part of his fleet off Carthagena to head towards the strangers and chase. He had at the same time, of course, to keep his grip on M. de la Clue inside Carthagena and prevent him from making use of the opportunity to break out.
The strangers showed no colours and were too far off to be identified, but it was certain they could only be French ships. Indeed, too, as the English turned towards them, they began to edge away. A little later they divided and went off on different courses. One ship, a two-decker, stood in directly for the land. The smallest, the frigate, stood seaward, to the south-west. To cut off the two-decker and stop her from getting into Spanish waters the Monarch and Montague were detached and went off chasing to the north-west. The frigate was already practically out of reach. A little later the remaining two French ships, both two-deckers, were seen to draw apart. One of them headed as if to work round into Carthagena. The other, the biggest ship of the whole squadron, held on down the coast, as though to draw the British after her. In pursuit of the first of these two two-deckers went the Revenge and the Berwick. The Monmouth and the Swiftsure, with the Hampton Court following them, went after the big ship. Of what force the French ships were, or their identity, nobody of course could tell as yet. They were too far off for the ports on their broadsides to be counted.
It is with the Monmouth and her chase that we are particularly concerned.
From off the Monmouth's deck all that at first could be seen of the chase was that she 'loomed large,' as the old sea phrase went—looked likely to be a tough customer. That, though, was so much the better. Going ahead before the wind with every reef shaken out, on her best point of sailing, the Monmouth soon outstripped the Swiftsure and the Hampton Court. By early in the afternoon she had left them both some leagues astern—mere dots on the far horizon. At the same time she was overhauling the big Frenchman fast. The Monmouth had the reputation of being the fastest line-of-battle ship in the Royal Navy. 'She never gave chase to any ship that she did not come up with,' said the newspapers of her, when, in 1767, the Monmouth, unfit for further service and worn out after twenty-five years on the effective list of the fleet, was brought in to be broken up. To-day the ship displayed a speed in keeping with her reputation. Hand over hand the Monmouth drew up nearer and nearer to her prospective foe, which loomed ever larger and larger. From the stranger's vast bulk and what gun-ports of her double tier could be counted end-on, from nearly dead astern, the chase was either an eighty-gun ship or an eighty-four.
If that was really so, it made all the difference in the world. French eighty-fours were at that day the most powerfully armed ships afloat. A French eighty-four carried 42-pounders as her main armament, and threw a broadside of 1136 lbs. at every discharge. That, in point of fact, was heavier metal than the Royal George herself, the biggest first-rate in the British fleet, could throw. The Monmouth was a small third-rate, one of the very smallest ships of the line in the Royal Navy, a sixty-four. Her heaviest guns were 24-pounders. Her total broadside amounted only to some 540 lbs. There would also be on board the eighty-four from 800 to 900 men, as against 470 in the Monmouth.
Who and what was the stranger? One man on board the Monmouth knew, and apparently one man only.
The captain of the Monmouth knew. He had already identified the ship ahead of him as the great Foudroyant of 84 guns, until recently the flagship of the French Mediterranean fleet. Arthur Gardiner had good reason to know the Foudroyant.
Gardiner had been Byng's flag-captain, and the Foudroyant had been the flagship of the French fleet off Minorca. The evidence at Byng's trial had absolutely exonerated Captain Gardiner.[3] It showed that Admiral Byng himself had practically taken the charge of the flagship out of his captain's hands, and had rejected his advice to go straight for the enemy without waiting for ships that were out of station, but in spite of that Gardiner had refused to be satisfied. He felt his connection with the affair bitterly, as a personal disgrace, he said. Indeed, as he told one of his friends, he only lived to find an opportunity of wiping out what was a slur on his good name, a stain on his honour. Apparently the idea became fixed in Captain Gardiner's mind that he was a marked man, that people said things of him; especially, that it was thought he had been 'shy' about laying his ship alongside the French flagship. That was intolerable, and out of it grew a feeling of peculiar antipathy towards this particular ship, the Foudroyant, that had become a sort of monomania with Captain Gardiner. It must, in these circumstances, have seemed to Captain Gardiner like the hand of Providence, when, some four months after the Byng court-martial, he was appointed to the Monmouth and ordered out to the Mediterranean. And now his day had actually come. There was the very Foudroyant right ahead of him, by herself, and with his own ship overtaking her fast.