[Illustration: HAWKE’S VICTORY IN QUIBERON BAY
_Painted by Swaine. Engraved and Published in 1760._
_The picture shows the “Royal George” (in the centre) sinking the “Superbe,” and the “Formidable” (immediately beyond the “Superbe” and in the background) lowering her colours to the “Resolution” (the ship coming up astern of the “Royal George”)_]
The _Formidable_ was plainly at her last gasp, as it were; a wreck above and below, her masts down and her rigging lying in tangled heaps of torn canvas and cordage over the side, the bulwarks shattered to the level of the deck, the hull gashed with gaping holes from which streams of sea water spouted in cascades at every roll of the ship. Still, with all that, her gallant first lieutenant, the sole surviving naval officer on board, would not give in. The _Formidable_ was a flagship, he declared, and, as a point of honour, to a flagship only should she strike. Manning what guns he could, he made his final effort to hold out just a little longer. It was magnificent, but it was hardly war. It was heroic, but it proved impossible. The gallant young Frenchman’s ambition was destined not to be realized. There was no time for it. The big _Royal George_, with Hawke’s blue flag flying out at the main, could be seen approaching, but she was not yet quite alongside. Before the _Royal George_ could challenge, the deadly fire of the _Resolution’s_ guns had done its work, and all hope of further resistance was at an end. Yet another British ship also, the _Burford_, was fast approaching the scene, intent apparently on joining in with the _Resolution_. It was hopeless now to wait for the _Royal George_, and the heroically defended ensign of the _Formidable_ had to come down. The _Formidable_ lowered her colours to the _Resolution_—exactly at five minutes to four o’clock.
Towards the end, Conflans himself in the _Soleil Royal_, with de Beauffremont and one of his captains, tacked and doubled back as if to the rescue of the _Formidable_, but they were too late.
What took place elsewhere on the scene of battle, during the short three-quarters of an hour that the waning daylight of the stormy winter’s afternoon lasted, before the fighting had of necessity to cease, are beyond our limits. How, for instance, the master of the _Royal George_, getting anxious about the reefs and sandbanks that showed up amid the breakers on either side as they surged ahead into the fight, declared that he dared not take the big three-decker further inshore, and drew from Hawke’s lips the heroic words, “You have done your duty in pointing out the danger; now go on and lay me beside the French Admiral!”; how the _Royal George_ herself after that came within an ace of shipwreck as she fought; of the catastrophe to the French _Superbe_, sent to the bottom in attempting to keep the _Royal George_ from closing with her flagship, by one terrific broadside from the _Royal George_, to the horror of the British flagship’s crew themselves as the smoke of the guns blew off and they saw three topmasts disappear under water, “in a hideously sudden manner,” where thirty seconds earlier had floated a noble man-of-war; how finally Conflans himself sheered off before the _Royal George’s_ guns, and ran away to wreck his flagship and burn her next morning:—to recount in detail these and the many other dramatic incidents of that “thunderous miscellany of cannon and tempest,” as Carlyle called the battle of Quiberon Bay, are beyond our present scope.