ips took place, one of which
is too remarkable to pass unnoticed. Captain Gardiner of the "Monmouth,"
a ship of four hundred and seventy men and sixty-four guns, engaged the
French ship "Foudroyant," carrying a thousand men and eighty-four guns
of heavier metal than those of the Englishman. Gardiner had lately been
reproved by Anson, First Lord of the Admiralty, for some alleged
misconduct or shortcoming, and he thought of nothing but retrieving his
honor. "We must take her," he said to his crew as the "Foudroyant" hove
in sight. "She looks more than a match for us, but I will not quit her
while this ship can swim or I have a soul left alive;" and the sailors
answered with cheers. 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.

Chapter 19

1758

Louisbourg

The stormy coast of Cape Breton is indented by a small land-locked bay,
between which and the ocean lies a tongue of land dotted with a few
grazing sheep, and intersected by rows of stone that mark more or less
distinctly the lines of what once wer