The French admiral had flattered himself that the enemy, ignorant of the ground, would not dare to follow him round the Cardinals.  He was soon undeceived.  Hawke’s comment on the situation was that he was “for the old way of fighting, to make downright work with them.”  It was an old way, true; but he had more than once seen it lost to mind, and had himself done most to restore it to its place,—­a new way as well as an old.  The signals for the general chase and for battle were kept aloft, and no British ship slacked her way.  Without ranged order, save that of speed, the leaders mingled with the French rear; the roar and flashes of the guns, the falling spars and drifting clouds of smoke, now adding their part to the wild magnificence of the scene.  Though tactically perfect in the sole true sense of tactics, that the means adopted exactly suited the situation, this was a battle of incidents, often untold,—­not one of manoeuvres.  As the ships, rolling heavily, buried their flanks deeply in the following seas, no captain dared to open his lower tier of ports, where the most powerful artillery was arrayed—­none save one, the French Thesee, whose rashness was rebuked by the inpouring waters, which quickly engulfed both ship and crew.  The Superbe met a like fate, though not certainly from the same cause.  She sank under the broadside of the Royal George, Hawke’s flag-ship.  “The Royal George’s people gave a cheer,” wrote an eye witness, “but it was a faint one; the honest sailors were touched at the miserable state of so many hundreds of poor creatures.”  Americans and English can couple this story of long ago with Philip’s ejaculation off Santiago de Cuba, but three years since:  “Don’t cheer, boys, those poor devils are dying.”

By five o’clock two French ships had struck, and two had been sunk.  “Night was now come,” wrote Hawke, “and being on a part of the coast, among islands and shoals of which we were totally ignorant, without a pilot, as was the greatest part of the squadron, and blowing hard on a lee shore, I made the signal to anchor.”  The day’s work was over, and doubtless looked to him incomplete, but it was effectually and finally done.  The French Navy did not again lift up its head during the three years of war that remained.  Balked in their expectation that the foe’s fear of the beach would give them refuge, harried and worried by the chase, harnessed to no fixed plan of action, Conflans’s fleet broke apart and fled.  Seven went north, and ran ashore at the mouth of the little river Vilaine which empties into Quiberon Bay.  Eight stood south, and succeeded in reaching Rochefort.  The fate of four has been told.  Conflans’s flag-ship anchored after night among the British, but at daybreak next morning cut her cables, ran ashore, and was burned by the French.  One other, wrecked on a shoal in the bay, makes up the tale of twenty-one.  Six were wholly lost to their navy; the seven that got into Vilaine only escaped to Brest by twos, two years later, while the Rochefort division was effectually blocked by occupying Basque Roads, the islands of which and of Quiberon were cultivated as kitchen gardens for the refreshment of British crews.