the order for a general chase, supplemented by a watchful supervision, which should check the over-rash and stimulate the over-cautious.  If Hood’s account of the sail carried by Rodney be correct, the Commander-in-Chief did not even set the best example.  In this languid pursuit, the three crippled French ships were overhauled, and of course had to strike; and a fourth, the Ardent, 64, was taken, owing to her indifferent sailing.  Towards sunset the flagship Ville de Paris, 110,[125] the finest ship of war afloat, having been valiantly defended against a host of enemies throughout great part of the afternoon, and having expended all her ammunition, hauled down her colours.  The two British vessels then immediately engaged with her were the Russell and the Barfleur, Hood’s flagship, to the latter of which she formally surrendered; the exact moment, noted in Hood’s journal, being 6.29 P.M.

At 6.45 Rodney made the signal for the fleet to bring-to (form line and stop) on the port tack, and he remained lying-to during the night, while the French continued to retreat under the orders of the Marquis de Vaudreuil, who by de Grasse’s capture had become commander-in-chief.  For this easy-going deliberation also Hood had strong words of condemnation.

“Why he should bring the fleet to because the Ville de Paris was taken, I cannot reconcile.  He did not pursue under easy sail, so as never to have lost sight of the enemy in the night, which would clearly and most undoubtedly have enabled him to have taken almost every ship the next day....  Had I had the honour of commanding his Majesty’s noble fleet on the 12th, I may, without much imputation of vanity, say the flag of England should now have graced the sterns of upwards of twenty sail of the enemy’s ships of the line."[126]

Such criticisms by those not responsible are to be received generally with caution; but Hood was, in thought and in deed, a man so much above the common that these cannot be dismissed lightly.  His opinion is known to have been shared by Sir Charles Douglas, Rodney’s Captain of the Fleet;[127] and their conclusion is supported by the inferences to be drawn from Rodney’s own assumptions as to the condition of the French, contrasted with the known facts.  The enemy, he wrote, in assigning his reasons for not pursuing, “went off in a close connected body,[128] and might have defeated, by rotation, the ships that had come up with them.”  “The enemy who went off in a body of twenty-six ships of the line,[128] might, by ordering two or three of their best sailing ships or frigates to have shown lights at times, and by changing their course, have induced the British fleet to have followed them, while the main of their fleet, by hiding their lights, might have hauled their wind, and have been far to windward by daylight, and intercepted the captured ships, and the most crippled ships of the English;” and he adds that the Windward Islands even might have been endangered.  That such action was in a remote degree possible to a well-conditioned fleet may be guardedly conceded; but it was wildly improbable to a fleet staggering under such a blow as the day had seen, which had changed its commander just as dark came on, and was widely scattered and disordered up to the moment when signals by flags became invisible.