The Hampton Court was a couple of miles or so astern of the Swiftsure.
The enemy, for their part, with their heavier guns, smote the Monmouth hard and answered back her fire with equal spirit. Even now though, the French commodore would not risk bringing-to for a space and making an effort to get the Monmouth fairly under his broadside, where his crushing superiority in gun-power might well have been decisive. He held on instead, drifting slowly before the light wind, fighting as he went. So far there was little to disquiet M. du Quesne in the way that things were going. As a fact, during the first hour, the terrific punishment that the Foudroyant's 42-pounders were able to inflict told heavily on the Monmouth, and it looked as though the Foudroyant could well hold her own to the end. Captain Gardiner, however, stuck to his task unflinchingly. All the time an incessant fire of musketry was kept up from the Foudroyant's tops, and from her towering bulwarks, which were lined with soldiers all along the length of the ship.
They did considerable execution among the men at the upper-deck guns, and, among their other victims, wounded Captain Gardiner himself with a musket bullet through the arm. It was an ugly wound, but the gallant captain of the Monmouth refused to quit the deck, and had the wound bound up as he stood. This was about a quarter to nine.
Fate, however, unhappily had more in store for Arthur Gardiner that night. At half-past nine, the captain received a second and a mortal wound. 'Captain Gardiner received a mortal wound which obliged him to be conveyed off the deck,' Lieutenant Carkett briefly records. A grape-shot struck Gardiner on the forehead, according to the journal of Lieutenant Baron,[6] the third lieutenant, and he was carried below insensible, to linger in the cockpit until four next morning, when he died, 'having been speechless since he received his wound.'
Neither account exactly tallies with the story of Gardiner's fall that reached England. According to that, poor Gardiner was conscious for some moments after he was struck down, and was able to recognise Carkett, as the first lieutenant bent over him. He bade Carkett, it was said, as his last orders, 'to fight the Foudroyant to the last, and sink alongside rather than quit her.' In reply, the account proceeds, Carkett swore to the captain to fight the battle out to the very last, and sent on the spot for the carpenter and had the Monmouth's ensign nailed to the staff, after which he declared with an oath that he would shoot dead on the spot any man who should even whisper a thought of lowering it. So, indeed, it well may have been. Robert Carkett could be trusted to die hard. He was just the man to make such a threat and to keep it. Lieutenant Carkett was a rough sea-dog.
As senior officer after Captain Gardiner's fall, Carkett took charge on the quarter-deck, and the battle went on with even more desperate fury than before:—
Spars were splinter'd, decks were shatter'd,
Bullets fell like rain;
Over mast and deck were scatter'd
Blood and brains of men.
Hour after hour, from half-past nine to twelve o'clock, the Monmouth hung doggedly on the quarter of the great Foudroyant and refused to be shaken off. She kept pace with the Frenchman steadily, not losing a foot, and not drawing nearer; mercilessly pounding away into the Foudroyant's hull at a short seventy-yards range, as fast as the shot could be brought to the guns. Nor did the Foudroyant's fire in reply slacken appreciably until midnight was past. Then, at length, the enemy seemed to tire, and the Foudroyant's fire began to grow irregular and gradually to weaken.
