“They have done for me at last, Hardy,” Nelson said feebly.
“Oh, I hope not!” cried Hardy.
“Yes,” was the reply; “my backbone is shot through!”
The bearers carried him down the ladders to the lower deck. On the way, despite his awful agony, Nelson had thoughts for nothing but the battle; he ordered that new tiller ropes should be rigged to replace those which had been shot away at the moment the Victory had crashed into the Redoutable. Then, that they might not recognise him, he covered his face and stars with his handkerchief.
They carried him into the cockpit. We will leave him, and return to the conflict.
The men in the Redoutable’s top still kept up their galling fire, as also did the guns of the second deck, and in less than fifteen minutes after Nelson had been shot down, no fewer than fifty of the Victory’s officers and men had met a like fate.
Then the French determined to board. As it was impossible to do this by the bulwarks, they lowered their main yard and turned it into a bridge, over which they scrambled on to the deck of the Victory.
“Repel boarders!”
It was a cry like that of a wild beast, and it brought the lion’s whelps from the lower decks. They hurled themselves at the venturesome Frenchmen. With pistol and pike, cutlass and axe, the English fought with the ferocity that had made them so dreaded in the past; when other weapons failed they fought with bare fists, hurling the trespassers overboard.
It cost the Victory thirty men to repel that attack. But it cost the Redoutable more; and very soon not a Frenchman was left alive on the decks of Nelson’s ship.