The fight was long and furious. Gardiner was
killed by a musket shot, begging his first lieutenant with his dying
breath not to haul down his flag. The lieutenant nailed it to the mast.
At length the "Foudroyant" ceased from thundering, struck her colors,
and was carried a prize to England.[575]
[Footnote 575: Entick, III. 56-60.]
The typical British naval officer of that time was a rugged sea-dog, a
tough and stubborn fighter, though no more so than the politer
generations that followed, at home on the quarter-deck, but no ornament
to the drawing-room, by reason of what his contemporary, Entick, the
strenuous chronicler of the war, calls, not unapprovingly, "the ferocity
of his manners." While Osborn held La Clue imprisoned at Toulon, Sir
Edward Hawke, worthy leader of such men, sailed with seven ships of the
line and three frigates to intercept a French squadron from Rochefort
convoying a fleet of transports with troops for America. The French
ships cut their cables and ran for the shore, where most of them
stranded in the mud, and some threw cannon and munitions overboard to
float themselves. The expedition was broken up. Of the many ships fitted
out this year for the succor of Canada and Louisbourg, comparatively few
reached their destination, and these for the most part singly or by twos
and threes.
Meanwhile Admiral Boscawen with his fleet bore away for Halifax, the
place of rendezvous, and Amherst, in the ship "Dublin," followed in his
wake.
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