sh liner, however,
drifted--rather than sailed--into the black pall of smoke, the roar of
the fight deepened and widened until the whole space between the _Royal
Sovereign_ and the _Victory_ was shaken with mighty pulse-beats of
sound that marked the furious and quick-following broadsides.

The scene immediately about the _Victory_ was very remarkable. The
_Victory_ had run foul of the _Redoutable_, the anchors of the two
ships hooking into each other. The concussion of the broadsides would,
no doubt, have driven the two hulls apart, but that the _Victory's_
studding-sail boom iron had fastened, like a claw, into the leech of
the Frenchman's fore-topsail. The _Temeraire_, coming majestically up
through the smoke, raked the _Bucentaure_, and closed with a crash on
the starboard side of the _Redoutable_, and the four great ships lay in
a solid tier, while between their huge grinding sides came, with a
sound and a glare almost resembling the blast of an exploding mine, the
flash, the smoke, the roar of broadside after broadside.

In the whole heroic fight there is no finer bit of heroism than that
shown by the _Redoutable_. She was only a 74-gun ship, and she had the
_Victory_, of 100 guns, and the _Temeraire_, of 98, on either side. It
is true these ships had to fight at the same time with a whole ring of
antagonists; nevertheless, the fire poured on the _Redoutable_ was so
fierce that only courage of a steel-like edge and temper could have
sustained it. The gallant French ship was semi-dismasted, her hull
shot through in every direction, one-fourth of her guns were
dismounted. Out of a crew of 643, no fewer than 523 were killed or
wounded. Only 35, indeed, lived to reach England as prisoners. And
yet she fought on. The fire from her great guns, indeed, soon ceased,
but the deadly splutter of musketry from such of her tops as were yet
standing was maintained; and, as Brenton put it, "there was witnessed
for nearly an hour and a half the singular spectacle of a French 74-gun
ship engaging a British first and second rate, with small-arms only."

As a matter of fact, the _Victory_ repeatedly ceased firing, believing
that the _Redoutable_ had struck, but still the venomous and deadly
fire from the tops of that vessel continued; and it was to this
circumstance, indeed, that Nelson owed his death. He would never put
small-arms men in his own tops, as he believed their fire interfered
with the working of the sails,