n the _Imperieuse_ was
watching, with powder-blackened face, the curious spectacle of the
entire fleet he had driven ashore, and the yet more amazing spectacle
of a British fleet declining to come in and finally destroy its enemy.
For here comes a chapter in the story on which Englishmen do not love
to dwell. Cochrane tried to whip the muddy-spirited Gambier into
enterprise by emphatic and quick-following signal. At six A.M. he
signalled, "_All the enemy's ships except two are on shore_," but this
extracted from drowsy Gambier no other response than the answering
pennant. Cochrane repeated his impatient signals at half-hour
intervals, and with emphasis ever more shrill--"_The enemy's ships can
be destroyed_"; "_Half the fleet can destroy the enemy_"; "_The
frigates alone can destroy the enemy_"; but still no response save the
indifferent pennant. As the tide flowed in, the French ships showed
signs of getting afloat, and Cochrane signalled, "_The enemy is
preparing to heave off_", even this brought no response from the
pensive Gambier. At eleven o'clock the British fleet weighed and stood
in, but then, to Cochrane's speechless wrath, re-anchored at a distance
of three and a half miles, and by this time two of the French
three-deckers were afloat.

Gambier finally despatched a single mortar-vessel in to bombard the
stranded ships, but by this time Cochrane had become desperate. He
adopted a device which recalls Nelson's use of his blind eye at
Copenhagen. At one o'clock he hove his anchor atrip and drifted, stern
foremost, towards the enemy. He dare not make sail lest his trick
should be detected and a signal of recall hoisted on the flagship.
Cochrane coolly determined, in a word, to force the hand of his
sluggish admiral. He drifted with his solitary frigate down to the
hostile fleet and batteries, which Gambier thought it scarcely safe to
attack with eleven ships of the line. When near the enemy's position
he suddenly made sail and ran up the signal, "_In want of assistance_";
next followed a yet more peremptory message, "_In distress_." Even
Gambier could not see an English frigate destroyed under the very guns
of an English fleet without moving to its help, and he sent some of his
ships in. But meanwhile, Cochrane, though technically "in distress,"
was enjoying what he must have felt to be a singularly good time. He
calmly took up a position which enabled him to engage an 80-gun ship,
one of 74 guns,