On the night of the twenty-fourth I had the middle watch.  Towards two o’clock Joe Punchard came to me, smoking a pipe, and looking more miserable than I had ever seen him.

“Twill break my captain’s heart if we have another day of it,” he says gloomily.  “He looks five years older than he did when we left Port Royal.  He can’t sleep, and if he do fall into a doze he starts up like a child out of a bad dream.  He swears he will court martial the captains, every man jack of them, when we get to port, but that won’t win us the battle, and he has set his heart on giving the Frenchmen a drubbing.  And he’s took a notion that he’ll never get through alive, which is so uncommon unlike him, being mostly so cheery, that it gives me the dumps bad.”

I was saying what I could to cheer the good fellow when the lookout cries he sees a sail ahead.  The admiral rushes out of his cabin and orders the drums to beat to quarters.  In an instant, as it seemed, the decks were full of men.  ’Twas a clear night, with very little wind, and we could see one of the French ships within hail of us.  We gave her a tremendous broadside from all three decks at once, with double shot, round below, and round and partridge aloft.  She returned it hotly, striking down many of our good fellows; I myself narrowly escaped one of the shot, which hit a man at my side, carrying away his right arm clear from the shoulder.

We kept up the duel of firing for near an hour, and then I heard a great cry go up that the admiral was wounded, and by and by Joe comes to me with tears streaming down his cheeks, and says that the admiral’s right leg was shattered to pieces by a chain shot, and he was carried below.  But while he was still talking to me we heard a great shout and there was Mr. Benbow being hoisted in his cradle on to the quarterdeck, and crying out “Good cheer, my hearties!  The Frenchmen have given me a knock, but we’ve got ’em now and by God! we’ll beat ’em!”

And then they cheered him again, and he, sitting in his cradle, making nothing of his dreadful pain, gave orders and shouted encouragement for a good three hours.

When the morning light showed us the ship we had been fighting, she appeared a mere ruin; her main yard down and shot to pieces, her fore-topsail yard shot away, her mizzen mast by the board, all her rigging gone, and her sides bored through and through with our double-headed shot.  And near by us stood my old ship the Falmouth, which in the darkness had assisted us very much in crippling this great vessel of seventy guns, the sternmost of the French squadron.

Soon afterwards we saw the other ships of the enemy bearing down upon us before a strong easterly wind; at the same time the Windsor, Pendennis and Greenwich, ahead of the enemy, ran to leeward of the disabled ship, gave her their broadsides (’twas like flogging a dead horse), and then stood to the southward.  Whereupon up comes the Defiance, and passes like the others; and while we were still in our amazement at this sudden bravery, the battered ship fired twenty of her guns at the Defiance, whereupon she ports her helm a-weather and runs away right before the wind, lowering both her topsails without any regard to the signal for battle.