THE FORMIDABLE BREAKING THE LINE. April 12, 1782
[The original water-colour was painted for the Duke of Rutland (elder brother of Captain Lord Robert Manners, mortally wounded in the battle), and is at Belvoir Castle.]
Immediately after that, as the smoke cleared off, a group of three or four French ships were made out near at hand, all huddled together in a mass. They were the ships that had been following the Diadème. Thrown aback by the shift of wind, and further disordered by the sudden turning round of the Diadème herself right across their bows, they had got jammed together in confusion, 'almost, if not quite, in contact with each other.' They were full in the path of the Formidable as she went through the line. She had to pass quite close to them. At the same instant the Duke was about to pass on the farther side of the group. Captain Gardner had seen the admiral, astern of him, swing round suddenly to break through the enemy's line, and guessing what was intended, had of his own accord followed suit, forcing his way through between the two Frenchmen nearest himself at the moment. Thus the hapless group of French ships found itself all at once placed under fire on two sides from the most powerful three-deckers in the British fleet, they themselves also at that moment being hardly able to fire a shot in reply. It was a shattering and an overwhelming stroke. It practically crushed the French centre out of existence as a fighting entity. Rodney's men had only to fire 'into the brown.' Dr. Blane, who was watching it all from the Formidable's gangway, by Rodney's side, describes what he saw. 'The unfortunate group, composing now only one large single object to fire at, was attacked ... all at once, receiving several broadsides from each ship, not a single shot missing, and dreadful must have been the slaughter.'
Captain Fanshawe's hard-hitting Namur, a 90-gun ship, followed the Formidable; then came Inglis's St. Albans, a 64; Cornwallis's Canada, one of the deadliest fighting 74's in Rodney's fleet; Dumaresq's Repulse, another 64, manned by a smart set of Guernsey lads; and Nicholas Charrington's 74, the Ajax. One after the other these all filed close past the helpless crowd of panic-stricken Frenchmen, firing into them fast and furiously. Each one, at the same time, passed close and fired into the luckless Glorieux on the farther side,—still quivering after the last tremendous salvo from, to use Captain Douglas's own expression, 'the Formidable's thundering starboard side,' racked through and through by that awful tornado of 8 cwts. of solid shot, lying like a log on the water, a bare hulk under a mass of splintered spars, torn canvas and tangled rigging. Captain Inglis of the St. Albans was watching her and made note of what he saw. The Glorieux, said Inglis, did not return a single shot to the St. Albans' broadside, although the rags of her colours could be seen still fluttering defiantly from where they had been nailed to the stump of the mizen mast. Only one man was to be seen on deck, on the poop, and he, poor fellow, dropped to the St. Albans' marines. After his ship had passed the Glorieux Inglis looked back at her and watched the Canada give her a staggering broadside. 'From the dust, the pieces of timber, and the smoke which flew to a great distance from the side opposite of that where she had received the blow, it seemed as if the ship (literally speaking) had been blown out of the water, and as if the whole of the mass had been driven to windward'!
With the smashing of the French centre the fate of the day was settled. The end might be some hours off—as it was in fact,—but from now onwards it was plainly in sight. 'From this moment,' says Blane, 'victory declared itself. All was disorder and confusion throughout the enemy's fleet from end to end.'
As a fact, to make things worse still for the enemy, De Grasse's line had been broken through in yet another place. At the same moment that Rodney's ships were crossing the French line at the centre, Hood's division was breaking through it in the rear. It was quite unintentional with Hood and his captains, a blunder in the smoke fog; but it had a most telling effect on the fortunes of the day. It completed the ruin of De Grasse's array. The same southerly shift of the wind which had caused the gap in the centre was the cause primarily of Hood's going through farther along the line. The Bedford, Commodore Affleck, the rear ship of Rodney's centre squadron, was following in her place, astern of the Ajax, when she suddenly lost her leader in the smoke. At that instant the shift of wind broke up the French. Unaware of what she was doing, the Bedford, keeping her helm steady and holding straight ahead, pushed through the nearest gap in the enemy's line. So little, in fact, was the Bedford's captain aware of what was happening, that the first intimation he had of what he had done was the sudden discovery that he had no enemy to starboard to fire at. As the best thing to be done he ported helm and stood on along the larboard side of the enemy's ships ahead, which belonged to De Grasse's corps de bataille, the French centre squadron. Hood's leading ships, the Prince William and the Magnificent, followed the Bedford, and in the wake of them, through the widening gap, poured the rest of Hood's ships, ten in number. They pressed in, sweeping across the stern of the Hector, the rear ship of the French van, and between her and the César, the leader of De Grasse's squadron. Thus at one stroke were the ships of the French van cut off en bloc from the centre and the rear. One after the other, as they passed, Hood's twelve ships (or thirteen counting in the Bedford as one) cannonaded the César and the Hector, crippling both hopelessly, and reducing them to a state little better than that in which Rodney's five followers had left the Glorieux.
To give an idea of the wide expanse over which the battle was at this moment raging, it should be said that Hood's Barfleur, when she broke the line, was 2¼ miles from the Formidable. The Marlborough, away in the van, was 3½ miles off, and had already come out of action, having ceased firing after passing the French rearmost ships. Hood's rear ship, the Royal Oak, fired her parting broadside into the stern of the ill-starred César a few minutes after eleven, with which the first stage of the battle came to an end. The Formidable had ceased firing more than an hour before.
The two fleets, after passing through each other, drifted slowly apart, the breeze falling gradually away to light airs and mere catspaws, after which it dropped altogether and left both sides becalmed, to look at each other from a distance and repair damages. They lay like this, out of range for most of the ships, for upwards of an hour.
Each was left by the events of the morning in a straggling and broken-up array, but, as the clearing off of the smoke disclosed, in widely different circumstances. The British, though the three squadrons were all separated, were yet more or less within touch, and with each of their groups fairly well together. They were about four miles from the nearest of the French ships, and having regard to the quarter whence the breeze would in ordinary course spring up during the afternoon, to windward of them. The French, on the other hand, were in hopeless disorder at all points and all dead to leeward. They were lying anyhow, in three irregular groups or clusters of ships, and widely separated. The centre group comprised the Ville de Paris, herself, with five or six ships, all more or less crippled. Two miles from De Grasse and to leeward of him lay twelve ships of Bougainville's van squadron. Three or four miles away to westward was De Vaudreuil with the rear squadron. Such was the position on both sides when, between noon and one o'clock, the anticipated breeze suddenly sprang up, coming very light and fitful at first, then steadily and from the expected quarter.
One grim detail must be noted. As the two fleets drifted apart and men had time to look round, they saw, we are told, an awful sight, which struck horror into Briton and Frenchman alike. On all sides the water was alive with ravening sharks, that had swarmed up from the bottom, attracted to the spot, summoned to their banquet, by the splashes in the water and the noise of the cannonade. Right and left the surface of the sea was furrowed by the fins of the greedy monsters as they swam about, snapping savagely all round. Under the murderous fire of the British gunners most of the French ships had been turned into veritable slaughter-houses. Each ship had been packed with troops for the Jamaica expedition. Every seventy-four that morning, including the hundred and fifty or two hundred soldiers on board, had carried not fewer than nine hundred men at least. Some ships had had still more on board. The Ville de Paris, for one, carried thirteen hundred. Awful indeed had been the slaughter as the English broadsides, aimed at the French port-holes at point-blank range, swept the decks and tore lanes through the closely-packed masses of men as they stood helplessly at quarters. It was the dreadful sequel that interested the sharks. In order to get the dead out of the way at once in the turmoil of the fighting, and give room to work the guns, most of the bodies of the fallen had been pitched overboard then and there—the dead, and, as some said, the not quite dead as well. Many a poor fellow had gone overboard with the spars and rigging as they crashed over the side, shot away in action. Requin is, of course, the French for shark. As a fact, it is a popular corruption of the word 'requiem,' which was the old French name for the monster down to the seventeenth century. Littré explains why:—'à cause,' he says, 'qu'il n'y a plus à dire qu'un requiem pour celui qu'un requin saisit.'