omp was able to give some of the first comers a severe
hammering before their consorts came into action and relieved them of some
of the brunt of his fire.

The first shots had been fired between nine and ten a.m. Till after two in
the afternoon there was a close engagement, a steady, well-sustained
cannonade, with no attempt at manoeuvring on either side, the fleets
drifting slowly before the light wind, wrapped in powder smoke, in the
midst of which both sides made attempts to use their fireships against each
other. The only success was secured by the Dutch, who set the "Resolution"
ablaze. She drifted out of the line and burned to the water's edge after
her crew had abandoned her. There was heavy loss of life in both fleets.

For want of anything but the most rudimentary system of signalling,
admirals had little control of a fight once it was begun. Monk, in the
"Royal Charles," had to content himself with marking out De Ruyter's
flagship, the "Seven Provinces," as his immediate opponent, and fighting a
prolonged duel with her. He walked his quarter-deck chewing tobacco, a
habit he had acquired as a precaution against infection during the London
plague. He spoke at the outset with undeserved contempt of his opponent.
"Now," he said, "you shall see this fellow come and give me two broadsides
and then run." But De Ruyter's broadsides thundered for hour after hour.
However, the dogged persistency of the Dutch was met with persistent
courage as steady as their own.

London listened anxiously to the far-off rumbling of the cannonade on the
North Sea waters. Mr. Pepys went to Whitehall and found the Court "gone to
chapel, it being St. James's Day." Then he tells how--

"by and by, while they are at chapel and we waiting chapel being
done, come people out of the park, telling us that the guns are
heard plainly. And so everybody to the park, and by and by the
chapel done, the King and Duke into the bowling-green and upon
the leads, whither I went, and there the guns were plain to be
heard; though it was pretty to hear how confident some would be
in the loudness of the guns, which it was as much as ever I
could do to hear them."

All the Eastern counties must have heard the cannon-thunder droning and
rumbling like a far-off summer storm through the anxious hours of that
July day. As the afternoon went on even Dutch endurance found it hard to
stand up against the steadily sustained cannonade