mpted no pursuit of the scattered
French ships that were sailing away to the southward and the
north-westward. Enough had been done, he said. It was now his business to
refit his fleet and take it to Jamaica. He had shattered the French power
in the West Indian seas and made himself the master of the field of
operations. A younger and more vigorous man would have perhaps marked down
Vaudreuil's or Bougainville's fugitive divisions for utter destruction. But
Rodney was content with the solid success he had obtained.

The losses of the French fleet had been very heavy. In their crowded decks
the English fire had effected something like a massacre. On board the
"Ville de Paris" more men had been killed and wounded than in the whole
English fleet. Very few officers and men had escaped some kind of wound.
Many of the ships that had got away were now very shorthanded, with
leaking hulls, and spars and rigging badly cut up.

The effect of the victory was to enable England to obtain much better terms
in the treaty that was signed next year. A disastrous war was closed by a
brilliant success. But England owed to it more than this temporary
advantage. It was a new beginning, the opening event of the period of
splendid triumphs on the sea on the reputation of which we are still
living. To quote the words of Rodney's latest biographer,[16] "it marked
the beginning of that fierce and headlong yet well-calculated style of
sea-fighting which led to Trafalgar, and made England undisputed mistress
of the sea."

[16] David Hannay, "Rodney" (English Men of Action), p. 213.

[Illustration: A THREE-DECKER OF NELSON'S TIME]

CHAPTER IX

TRAFALGAR

1805

The closing years of the eighteenth century and the opening years of the
nineteenth represent the most splendid period in the annals of the British
Navy. Howe destroyed the French fleet in the Atlantic on "the glorious
First of June, 1794," Nelson died in the midst of his greatest victory off
Cape Trafalgar on 21 October, 1805. Little more than eleven years separated
the two dates, and this brief period was crowded with triumphs for Britain
on the sea. The "First of June," St. Vincent, Camperdown, the Nile,
Copenhagen, and Trafalgar are the great names in the roll of victory; but
"the meteor flag of England" flew victorious in a hundred fights on all the
seas of the world.

Men who were officers young in the service on the day when Rodney broke at
once t