compelled to do the same ; receiving, as she passed the Redoutable, a fire that carried away the head of her mizen topmast. When, after striking the Redoutable, the Victory again brought her head to the northward, the T�m�raire stood slowly on a short distance to the south-east ; and then hauled up to pass through the enemy's line. Meanwhile the Victory had, as already stated, dropped alongside the Redoutable, and the two ships were paying off to the eastward.

Scarcely had she begun to haul up, so as to avoid being raked by the French Neptune, ere the T�m�raire discovered, through the smoke, the Redoutable driving towards and almost on board of her. Even had the breeze, now barely sufficient to fill the sails, permitted the T�m�raire to manoeuvre to clear herself from the Redoutable, the Neptune, who, to avoid getting foul of the Redoutable and Victory, had wore and come to again on the same tack, and at this time lay with her larboard broadside bearing upon the starboard bow of the T�m�raire, opened heavy a raking fire, that in a few minutes the latter's fore yard and main topmast were shot away, and her foremast and bowsprit, particularly the latter, greatly damaged. In this unmanageable state, the T�m�raire could do no more than continue to cannonade the Redoutable with her larboard guns. This the former did until, having, as she had done those on the opposite side, shut down her lowerdeck ports, the Redoutable, at about, 1 h. 40 m. p.m., fell on board the T�m�raire, the French ship's bowsprit passing over the British ship's gangway a little before the main rigging ; and where, in order to have the benefit of bestowing a raking fire, the crew of the T�m�raire immediately lashed it. The raking fire was poured in, and very destructive, as we shall soon show, did it prove.

Most of the few effective men, left upon the Victory's upper deck after the Redoutable's destructive fire formerly noticed, * being employed in carrying their wounded comrades to the cockpit, Captain Hardy, Captain Adair of the marines, and or two other officers, were nearly all that remained upon the quarterdeck and poop. The men to the Redoutable's mizentop soon made this known to their officers below ; and a considerable portion of the French crew quickly assembled in the chains and along the gangway of their ship, in order to board the British three-decker ; whose defenceless state they inferred, not merely from her abandoned upper deck, but from the temporary silence of her guns on the decks below, occasioned by a supposition that the Redoutable, having discontinued her fire, was on the eve of surrendering. A party of the Victory's officers and men quickly ascended from the middle and lower decks ; and, after an interchange of musketry, the French crew, who, in addition to the unexpected opposition they experienced, found that the curve in

*  See p. 56.

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