's a passage for the
enemy," argued Hawke, "there is a passage for me! Where a Frenchman
can sail, an Englishman can follow! Their pilots shall be ours. If
they go to pieces in the shoals, they will serve as beacons for us."

And so, on the wild November afternoon, with the great billows that the
Bay of Biscay hurls on that stretch of iron-bound coast riding
shoreward in league-long rollers, Hawke flung himself into the boiling
caldron of rocks and shoals and quicksands. No more daring deed was
ever done at sea. Measured by mere fighting courage, there were
thousands of men in the British fleet as brave as Hawke. But the iron
nerve that, without an instant's pause, in a scene so wild, on a shore
so perilous, and a sea sown so thick with unknown dangers, flung a
whole fleet into battle, was probably possessed by no other man than
Hawke amongst the 30,000 gallant sailors who fought at Quiberon.

The fight, taking all its incidents into account, is perhaps as
dramatic as anything known in the history of war. The British ships
came rolling on, grim and silent, throwing huge sheets of spray from
their bluff bows. An 80-gun French ship, _Le Formidable_, lay in their
track, and each huge British liner, as it swept past to attack the main
body of the French, vomited on the unfortunate _Le Formidable_ a
dreadful broadside. And upon each British ship, in turn, as it rolled
past in spray and flame, the gallant Frenchman flung an answering
broadside. Soon the thunder of the guns deepened as ship after ship
found its antagonist. The short November day was already darkening;
the thunder of surf and of tempest answered in yet wilder notes the
deep-throated guns; the wildly rolling fleets offered one of the
strangest sights the sea has ever witnessed.

Soon Hawke himself, in the _Royal George_, of 100 guns, came on, stern
and majestic, seeking some fitting antagonist. This was the great ship
that afterwards sank ignobly at its anchorage at Spithead, with "twice
four hundred men," a tale which, for every English boy, is made famous
in Cowper's immortal ballad. But what an image of terror and of battle
the _Royal George_ seemed as in the bitter November storm she bore down
on the French fleet! Hawke disdained meaner foes, and bade his pilot
lay him alongside Conflans' flagship, _Le Soleil Royal_. Shoals were
foaming on every side, and the pilot warned Hawke he could not carry
the _Royal George_ farther in without risking