Sir Charles Hardy’s own work was half done. He returned home, leaving M. de Rochambeau at sea. The Frenchman blockaded the merchant ships in Lisbon. Among them were vessels on their way out with stores for the garrisons and ships in the Mediterranean. The necessity for action was pressing, and a fleet was sent out. It is a proof of the little confidence felt in the senior officers of the day that the work was entrusted to Sir John Balchen, a veteran of the wars of King William and Queen Anne, who had fought some forty years before as captain against Duguay-Trouin with more courage than success, and had lately been appointed Governor of Greenwich Hospital as a reward for long service. In spite of his great age (he was seventy-five), and his claim to exemption, Balchen left his well-earned rest, and took command of the fleet. He drove off Rochambeau, saw the trade safe to Gibraltar, and returned home in September. On the 4th October the fleet was scattered by a great storm at the entry to the Channel. Balchen’s flagship, the =Victory=, disappeared during the night of the 4th-5th October with her crew of a thousand men. She was considered an ill-built vessel and may have capsized, but Guernsey tradition asserted that the sound of minute guns was heard from the Casketts through the gale, and it was guessed that the =Victory= had been driven on the rocks. In one way or the other the sea took its own. During 1745 the fleets cruised unopposed. In the Mediterranean Admiral Rowley, who had succeeded Mathews, blockaded the Spaniards at Carthagena. He was so superior that he was able to send ships to harass the French trade as far off as the West Indies, to watch Cadiz, and to act against those Italian states in alliance with France. In America a squadron sent from the Leeward islands under Commodore Warren, covered the expedition from New England, a partly patriotic and partly commercial speculation of the colonists, which took Louisbourg in Cape Breton from the French in April, May, and June. Our enemies were so incapable and so unenterprising that our fleet had little to do. During the latter part of the year the interest of the country was mainly turned on the Jacobite rising. The share of the navy in this passage of our history was naturally important, since it had to prevent the French from sending help to the Jacobites. But no serious move was made by the French fleet, and no opportunity for service other than patrolling the coast, and capturing single ships which endeavoured to slip in with money and stores for the Prince, presented itself. The navy did indeed contribute materially to make the rising less serious than it might have been. Prince Charles had sailed from Nantes with two vessels, the _Doutelle_, a small craft in which he himself sailed, and the _Elizabeth_, a 64-gun ship employed to carry the bulk of his arms. When on the 47th parallel and thirty-nine leagues west of the Lizard,