and Rodney set off in pursuit, knowing that De
Grasse had a very few hours' start of him.

The few hours did not count for much, provided the English admiral could
once get on the Frenchman's track. The danger of missing him could only
arise from making at the outset a wrong judgment as to the course on which
the enemy would sail. It was De Grasse's business to avoid a battle until
he had safely taken his huge convoy to San Domingo and joined hands with
his Spanish allies. Rodney judged that he would most likely follow the long
curve of the chain of islands that fringe the Caribbean Sea, steering by
Puerto Rico for San Domingo. In the night of the 8th the English fleet
passed Martinique. Next morning it was off the west coast of Dominica,
making good speed, and away to the northward a far-spreading crowd of sails
showed that Rodney had guessed rightly. The French fleet and convoy were in
sight.

Dominica is a mass of volcanic ridges, falling to the seaward in
precipitous cliffs, rising landward tier above tier and shooting up into
rocky spires that culminate in the towering peak of the Morne Diablotin,
five thousand feet high. Under the shelter of this rugged island, while the
prevailing trade wind blows steadily from the eastward, there are sudden
calms, or irregular flaws of wind blowing now from one point, now from
another, diverted by the irregular ridges of the high land. This April
morning the sun had hardly risen when the wind fell, and the two fleets
drifted slowly, with loose-hanging sails. Near the north end of the island
lay the convoy. A little to the southward De Grasse's thirty battleships
straggled in a long line over some six miles of sunlit sea. Off the centre
and south of the island Rodney's larger fleet was stretched out in line
ahead. It was formed in three divisions. Hood, in the 90-gun "Barfleur,"
commanded the van. Rodney, with his flag flying in a tall three-decker, the
"Formidable," of 98 guns, was in the centre. The rear was commanded by
Rear-Admiral Samuel Drake, a namesake and descendant of that other Drake
whose name had been the terror of the West Indian seas in Elizabethan days.

Suddenly there came a flaw of wind sweeping from the south round the end of
the island, so narrow that most of the English fleet hardly felt it. It
filled the sails of Hood's ships in the van, and they steered for two
French battleships that dropped astern of their consorts. One of the
Frenchmen passed close und