English; a little relieved, however, by
the look-out vessels, all of which, in their case, were sailing along on
the weather-beam of their friends. The distance was still so great, as
to render glasses necessary in getting any very accurate notions of the
force and the point of sailing of Monsieur de Vervillin's fleet, the
ships astern being yet so remote as to require long practice to speak
with any certainty of their characters. In nothing, notwithstanding, was
the superior practical seamanship of the English more apparent, than in
the manner in which these respective lines were formed. That of Sir
Gervaise Oakes was compact, each ship being as near as might be a
cable's length distant from her seconds, ahead and astern. This was a
point on which the vice-admiral prided himself; and by compelling his
captains rigidly to respect their line of sailing, and by keeping the
same ships and officers, as much as possible, under his orders, each
captain of the fleet had got to know his own vessel's rate of speed, and
all the other qualities that were necessary to maintain her precise
position. All the ships being weatherly, though some, in a slight
degree, were more so than others, it was easy to keep the line in
weather like the present, the wind not blowing sufficiently hard to
render a few cloths more or less of canvass of any very great moment. If
there was a vessel sensibly out of her place, in the entire line, it was
the Achilles; Lord Morganic not having had time to get all his forward
spars as far aft as they should have been; a circumstance that had
knocked him off a little more than had happened to the other vessels.
Nevertheless, had an air-line been drawn at this moment, from the
mizzen-top of the Plantagenet to that of the Warspite, it would have
been found to pass through the spars of quite half the intermediate
vessels, and no one of them all would have been a pistol-shot out of the
way. As there were six intervals between the vessels, and each interval
as near as could be guessed at was a cable's length, the extent of the
whole line a little exceeded three-quarters of a mile.

On the other hand, the French, though they preserved a very respectable
degree of order, were much less compact, and by no means as methodical
in their manner of sailing. Some of their ships were a quarter of a mile
to leeward of the line, and the intervals were irregular and
ill-observed. These circumstances arose from several causes, nei