to her followers, secure that they would give due heed to the admiral’s order, that “every effort must be made to capture the hostile commander-in-chief,” the “Victory” put her helm up, inclining to the right, and ran on board a French seventy-four, the “Redoutable,” whose guns, as well as those of the French “Neptune,” had been busily playing upon her hitherto.  At 1.10 she lay along the port side of the “Redoutable,” the two ships falling off with their heads to the eastward, and moving slowly before the wind to the east-southeast.

In the duel which ensued between these two, in which Nelson fell, the disparity, so far as weight of battery was concerned, was all against the French ship; but the latter, while greatly overmatched at the guns, much the greater part of which were below deck, was markedly superior to her antagonist in small-arm fire on the upper deck, and especially aloft, where she had many musketeers stationed.  Nelson himself was averse to the employment of men in that position, thinking the danger of fire greater than the gain, but the result on this day was fatal to very many of the “Victory’s” men as well as to himself.  As the ship’s place in the battle was fixed for the moment, nothing now remained to be done, except for the crews to ply their weapons till the end was reached.  The admiral and the captain, their parts of direction and guidance being finished, walked back and forth together on the quarter-deck, on the side farthest from the “Redoutable,” where there was a clear space of a little over twenty feet in length, fore and aft, from the wheel to the hatch ladder leading down to the cabin.  The mizzen-top of the “Redoutable,” garnished with sharpshooters, was about fifty feet above them.  Fifteen minutes after the vessels came together, as the two officers were walking forward, and had nearly reached the usual place of turning, Nelson, who was on Hardy’s left, suddenly faced left about.  Hardy, after taking a step farther, turned also, and saw the admiral in the act of falling—­on his knees, with his left hand touching the deck; then, the arm giving way, he fell on his left side.  It was in the exact spot where Scott, the secretary, had been killed an hour before.  To Hardy’s natural exclamation that he hoped he was not badly hurt, he replied, “They have done for me at last;” and when the expression of hope was repeated, he said again, “Yes, my back-bone is shot through.”  “I felt it break my back,” he told the surgeon, a few minutes later.  The ball had struck him on the left shoulder, on the forward part of the epaulette, piercing the lung, where it severed a large artery, and then passed through the spine from left to right, lodging finally in the muscles of the back.  Although there was more than one mortal injury, the immediate and merciful cause of his speedy death was the internal bleeding from the artery.  Within a few moments of his wounding some forty officers and men were cut down by the same murderous fire from the tops of the enemy.  Indeed so stripped of men was the upper deck of the “Victory” that the French made a movement to board, which was repulsed, though with heavy loss.