Sir Gervaise proved to be partly right and partly wrong. The Frenchman did attempt a fire with his main-deck gun; but, at the first plunge of the ship, a sea slapped up against her weather-bow, and sent a column of water through the port, that drove half its crew into the lee-scuppers. In the midst of this waterspout, the gun exploded, the loggerhead having been applied an instant before, giving a sort of chaotic wildness to the scene in-board. This satisfied the party below; though that on the forecastle fared better. The last fired their gun several times, and always without success. This failure proceeded from a cause that is seldom sufficiently estimated by nautical gunners; the shot having swerved from the line of sight, by the force of the wind against which it flew, two or three hundred feet, by the time it had gone the mile that lay between the vessels. Sir Gervaise anxiously watched the effect of the fire, and perceiving that all the shot fell to leeward of the Chloe, he was no longer uneasy about that vessel, and he began to turn his attention to other and more important concerns.
As we are now approaching a moment when it is necessary that the reader should receive some tolerably distinct impression of the relative positions of the two entire fleets, we shall close the present chapter, here; reserving the duty of explanation for the commencement of a new one.
CHAPTER XXII.
——"All were glad,
And laughed, and shouted, as she darted on,
And plunged amid the foam, and tossed it high,
Over the deck, as when a strong, curbed steed
Flings the froth from him in his eager race."
Percival
The long twilight of a high latitude had now ended, and the sun, though concealed behind clouds, had risen. The additional light contributed to lessen the gloomy look of the ocean, though the fury of the winds and waves still lent to it a dark and menacing aspect. To windward there were no signs of an abatement of the gale, while the heavens continued to abstain from letting down their floods, on the raging waters beneath. By this lime, the fleet was materially to the southward of Cape la Hogue, though far to the westward, where the channel received the winds and waves from the whole rake of the Atlantic, and the seas were setting in, in the long, regular swells of the ocean, a little disturbed by the influence of the tides. Ships as heavy as the two-deckers moved along with groaning efforts, their bulk-heads and timbers "complaining," to use the language of the sea, as the huge masses, loaded with their iron artillery, rose and sunk on the coming and receding billows. But their movements were stately and full of majesty; whereas, the cutter, sloop, and even the frigates, seemed to be tossed like foam, very much at the mercy of the elements. The Chloe was passing the admiral, on the opposite tack, quite a mile to leeward, and yet, as she mounted to the summit of a wave, her cut-water was often visible nearly to the keel. These are the trials of a vessel's strength; for, were a ship always water-borne equally on all her lines, there would not be the necessity which now exists to make her the well-knit mass of wood and iron she is.
The progress of the two fleets was very much the same, both squadrons struggling along through the billows, at the rate of about a marine league in the hour. As no lofty sail was carried, and the vessels were first made in the haze of a clouded morning, the ships had not become visible to each other until nearer than common; and, by the time at which we have now arrived in our tale, the leading vessels were separated by a space that did not exceed two miles, estimating the distance only on their respective lines of sailing; though there would be about the same space between them, when abreast, the English being so much to windward of their enemies. Any one in the least familiar with nautical man[oe]uvres will understand that these circumstances would bring the van of the French and the rear of their foes much nearer together in passing, both fleets being close-hauled.
Sir Gervaise Oakes, as a matter of course, watched the progress of the two lines with close and intelligent attention. Mons. de Vervillin did the same from the poop of le Foudroyant, a noble eighty-gun ship in which his flag of vice-admiral was flying, as it might be, in defiance. By the side of the former stood Greenly, Bunting, and Bury, the Plantagenet's first lieutenant; by the side of the latter his capitaine de vaisseau, a man as little like the caricatures of such officers, as a hostile feeling has laid before the readers of English literature, as Washington was like the man held up to odium in the London journals, at the commencement of the great American war. M. de Vervillin himself was a man of respectable birth, of a scientific education, and of great familiarity with ships, so far as a knowledge of their general powers and principles was concerned; but here his professional excellence ceased, all that infinity of detail which composes the distinctive merit of the practical seaman being, in a great degree, unknown to him, rendering it necessary for him to think in moments of emergency; periods when the really prime mariner seems more to act by a sort of instinct than by any very intelligible process of ratiocination. With his fleet drawn out before him, however, and with no unusual demands on his resources, this gallant officer was an exceedingly formidable foe to contend with in squadron.
Sir Gervaise Oakes lost all his constitutional and feverish impatience while the fleets drew nigher and nigher. As is not unusual with brave men, who are naturally excitable, as the crisis approached he grew calmer, and obtained a more perfect command over himself; seeing all things in their true colours, and feeling more and more equal to control them. He continued to walk the poop, but it was with a slower step; and, though his hands were still closed behind his back, the fingers were passive, while his countenance became grave and his eye thoughtful. Greenly knew that his interference would now be hazardous; for whenever the vice-admiral assumed that air, he literally became commander-in-chief; and any attempt to control or influence him, unless sustained by the communication of new facts, could only draw down resentment on his own head. Bunting, too, was aware that the "admiral was aboard," as the officers, among themselves, used to describe this state of their superior's mind, and was prepared to discharge his own duty in the most silent and rapid manner in his power. All the others present felt more or less of this same influence of an established character.