lpless; a white flag beckoning for a prize crew.

"The _Faluere_ will attack the _Delft_," shouted Du Guay-Trouin,
running near the largest of these; a ship of thirty-eight guns. "I
must have time to breathe and to refit."

But stubborn Van Wassenaer was ready for his new antagonist. He
received the privateer with such a furious fire that she turned tail
and fled to leeward; her captain bleeding upon the poop, her crew
cursing the blood which ran in the veins of the valorous Hollander.

[Illustration: COMBAT BETWEEN DU GUAY-TROUIN AND VAN WASSENAER.]

Du Guay-Trouin had now recovered his breath. Again the bellying canvas
of the _St. Jacques des Victoires_ bore her down upon the _Delft_, and
again the two war-dogs wrapped in deadly embrace. Hear the invincible
Frenchman's own account of the final assault:

"With head down," he writes, "I rushed against the redoubtable Baron,
resolved to conquer or to perish. The last action was so sharp and so
bloody that every one of the Dutch officers was killed or wounded.
Wassenaer, himself, received four dangerous wounds and fell on his
quarterdeck, where he was seized by my own brave fellows, his sword
still in his hand.

"The _Faluere_ had her share in the engagement, running alongside of
me, and sending me forty men on board for reinforcement. More than
half of my own crew perished in this action. I lost in it one of my
cousins, first Lieutenant of my own ship, and two other kinsmen on
board the _Sans-Pareil_, with many other officers killed or wounded.
It was an awful butchery."

But at last he had won, and the victorious pennon of the Privateer
fluttered triumphant over the battered hulks which barely floated upon
the spar-strewn water.

"The horrors of the night," he writes, "the dead and dying below, the
ship scarcely floating, the swelling waves threatening each moment to
engulf her, the wild howling of the storm, and the iron-bound coast
of Bretagne to leeward, were all together such as to try severely the
courage of the few remaining officers and men.

"At daybreak, however, the wind went down; we found ourselves near the
Breton coast; and, upon our firing guns and making signals of
distress, a number of boats came to our assistance. In this manner was
the _St. Jacques_ taken into Port Louis, followed in the course of the
day by the three Dutch ships-of-war, twelve of the merchant ships, the
_Lenore_, and the two St. Malo privateers. The _Sans-Pareil_ did not
ge