master, observing by the motion of her rudder that the Jacobin was in the act of bearing up, ordered the helm of the Queen-Charlotte to be put hard a-starboard ; and so little room had the British three-decker to spare in luffing up, that her jib-boom grazed the larboard mizen shrouds of the Jacobin.

Directing her larboard guns at the starboard quarter of the Montagne, the Queen-Charlotte discharged her opposite ones into the stern and larboard quarter of the Jacobin, now lying nearly becalmed under her lee. The Jacobin, as she dropped astern, returned this fire with such of her guns as would bear ; and a shot from one of them cut away the Queen-Charlotte's fore topmast. The movements of Lord Howe's ship, from the time she bore up to pass astern of the French admiral to the moment at which her topmast was shot away, the following diagram will more clearly exhibit.

Frustrated thus in her attempt to reach the lee-bow of the Montagne, the Queen-Charlotte could only continue to ply her larboard guns at the French three-decker, who, at about 10 h. 10 m. a.m., having had her stern-frame and starboard quarter dreadfully shattered, and sustained a loss of upwards of 100 killed, and nearly 200 wounded, set her maintopmast staysail, and without, incredulous as it may appear, bestowing a single shot in return for the many she had received (her ports, indeed, on the starboard or lee side appear to have been shut), ranged a head clear of the Queen-Charlotte's destructive fire.

Observing that the Jacobin had also made sail, and that several other French ships were preparing to follow the example of their admiral and his second, Lord Howe, it 10 h. 13 m, a.m., threw out the signal for a general chase. Meanwhile the Queen-Charlotte, checked in her progress, lay between the Juste, the Montagne's second ahead, on her larboard bow, and the Jacobin on her starboard quarter: the latter, however, soon disappeared, in the smoke to leeward