every ship the next day.... Had I
had the honour of commanding his Majesty's noble fleet on the
12th, I may, without much imputation of vanity, say the flag
of England should now have graced the sterns of _upwards_ of
twenty sail of the enemy's ships of the line."[126]

Such criticisms by those not responsible are to be received generally
with caution; but Hood was, in thought and in deed, a man so much
above the common that these cannot be dismissed lightly. His opinion
is known to have been shared by Sir Charles Douglas, Rodney's Captain
of the Fleet;[127] and their conclusion is supported by the inferences
to be drawn from Rodney's own assumptions as to the condition of
the French, contrasted with the known facts. The enemy, he wrote,
in assigning his reasons for not pursuing, "went off in a _close
connected body_,[128] and might have defeated, by rotation, the ships
that had come up with them." "The enemy _who went off in a body of
twenty-six ships of the line_,[128] might, by ordering two or three
of their best sailing ships or frigates to have shown lights at times,
and by changing their course, have induced the British fleet to have
followed them, while the main of their fleet, by hiding their lights,
might have hauled their wind, and have been far to windward by
daylight, and intercepted the captured ships, and the most crippled
ships of the English;" and he adds that the Windward Islands even
might have been endangered. That such action was in a remote degree
possible to a well-conditioned fleet may be guardedly conceded; but it
was wildly improbable to a fleet staggering under such a blow as the
day had seen, which had changed its commander just as dark came on,
and was widely scattered and disordered up to the moment when signals
by flags became invisible.

The facts, however, were utterly at variance with these ingenious
suppositions. Instead of being connected, as Rodney represents, de
Vaudreuil had with him next morning but ten ships; and no others
during the whole of the 13th. He made sail for Cap Francois, and was
joined on the way by five more, so that at no time were there upwards
of fifteen[129] French ships of the line together, prior to his
arrival at that port on April 25th. He there found four others of the
fleet. The tale of twenty-five survivors, from the thirty engaged on
April 12th, was completed by six which had gone to Curacao, and which
did not rejoin until May. So much f