an ill matched pair.  Nottingham was a Tory; Russell was a Whig.  Nottingham was a speculative seaman, confident in his theories.  Russell was a practical seaman, proud of his achievements.  The strength of Nottingham lay in speech; the strength of Russell lay in action.  Nottingham’s demeanour was decorous even to formality; Russell was passionate and rude.  Lastly Nottingham was an honest man; and Russell was a villain.  They now became mortal enemies.  The Admiral sneered at the Secretary’s ignorance of naval affairs; the Secretary accused the Admiral of sacrificing the public interests to mere wayward humour; and both were in the right.320

While they were wrangling, the merchants of all the ports in the kingdom raised a cry against the naval administration.  The victory of which the nation was so proud was, in the City, pronounced to have been a positive disaster.  During some months before the battle all the maritime strength of the enemy had been collected in two great masses, one in the Mediterranean and one in the Atlantic.  There had consequently been little privateering; and the voyage to New England or Jamaica had been almost as safe as in time of peace.  Since the battle, the remains of the force which had lately been collected under Tourville were dispersed over the ocean.  Even the passage from England to Ireland was insecure.  Every week it was announced that twenty, thirty, fifty vessels belonging to London or Bristol had been taken by the French.  More than a hundred prices were carried during that autumn into Saint Maloes alone.  It would have been far better, in the opinion of the shipowners and of the underwriters, that the Royal Sun had still been afloat with her thousand fighting men on board than that she should be lying a heap of ashes on the beach at Cherburg, while her crew, distributed among twenty brigantines, prowled for booty over the sea between Cape Finisterre and Cape Clear.321

The privateers of Dunkirk had long been celebrated; and among them, John Bart, humbly born, and scarcely able to sign his name, but eminently brave and active, had attained an undisputed preeminence.  In the country of Anson and Hawke, of Howe and Rodney, of Duncan, Saint Vincent and Nelson, the name of the most daring and skilful corsair would have little chance of being remembered.  But France, among whose many unquestioned titles to glory very few are derived from naval war, still ranks Bart among her great men.  In the autumn of 1692 this enterprising freebooter was the terror of all the English and Dutch merchants who traded with the Baltic.  He took and destroyed vessels close to the eastern coast of our island.  He even ventured to land in Northumberland, and burned many houses before the trainbands could be collected to oppose him.  The prizes which he carried back into his native port were estimated at about a hundred thousand pounds sterling.322 About the same time a younger adventurer, destined to equal or surpass Bart, Du Guay Trouin, was entrusted with the command of a small armed vessel.  The intrepid boy,—­for he was not yet twenty years old,—­entered the estuary of the Shannon, sacked a mansion in the county of Clare, and did not reimbark till a detachment from the garrison of Limerick marched against him.323