coasts. On the 10th of April, 1756, twelve French
ships-of-the-line and fifteen thousand troops sailed for Minorca, then a
British possession, and in the absence of a hostile fleet effected a
landing without opposition. The British cabinet having taken alarm too
late, Admiral Byng had sailed from Portsmouth, with ten ships, only
three days before the French left Toulon; when he arrived off Port
Mahon, six weeks later, a practicable breach in the works had already
been made. The French fleet was cruising outside in support of the
siege, and Byng, whose force had been increased to thirteen ships,
engaged it on May 20. The action was in itself indecisive; but, upon the
opinion of a council of war that nothing more could be done, Byng
retired to Gibraltar. The result to him personally is well known. Port
Mahon surrendered on June 28. War had by this been declared; by Great
Britain on the 17th of May, and by France June 20, 1756.

When the news of Byng's retreat was received in England, Hawke was sent
out to supersede him. He went only personally, accompanied by a second
in command, but with no fleet, and with sealed instructions. Opening
these when he reached Gibraltar, he found orders to send home Byng and
his second in command, and to institute an inquiry into the conduct of
the captains, suspending any one found "not to have acted with due
spirit and vigor." An investigation of this kind would enable him to
form an opinion of Byng's own conduct even more exact and authentic than
his other official opportunities for personal intercourse with the chief
actors, but he must have refrained with much discretion from expressing
his judgment on the affair in such way as to reach the public ear. It
was stated in the "Gentleman's Magazine," in 1766, that an inquiry was
provoked in the House of Commons, shortly after these events, by Pitt,
who took Byng's side; but that Hawke, being a member of the House,
denied some of Pitt's allegations as to the inadequacy of Byng's fleet,
on the strength of his own personal observation after taking over the
command. Thereupon, so the account says, the categorical test question,
the _argumentum ad hominem_, was put to him whether with Byng's means he
could have beat the enemy; and the manner of the first Pitt, in thus
dealing with an opponent in debate, can be imagined from what we know of
him otherwise. Whether the story be true or not, Hawke was not a man to
be so overborne, and the reply relat