We cannot suppose that the movement of tacking in succession was performed by two fleets, each of over a hundred sail, with absolute uniformity. On this occasion, as in the great battle of the 12th of April 1783, when Rodney pierced the French from leeward, the main line may have broken into smaller ones. But the general course of the battle was in three great zig-zags, ranging along the coast of Holland, from near Egmont towards the mouth of the Maas, which are at a distance of about forty miles from one another. There was no shrinking on the part of the Dutch, and no failure of effort on the part of the English to push the attack home. In many points of the line ships were locked together in desperate attempts to board, or repel boarders. By three in the afternoon victory belonged to the English. A large proportion of the Dutch had been cut off from Tromp, and had fallen to leeward. Most of them were probably too damaged to be in case to do more than put before the wind, and escape as best they could. They fled into Goree and the Maas. The bulk of their fleet was debarred from that refuge by the English, who were still to leeward, and therefore on the line of retreat. It could only head northward and eastward to the Texel. Thither in the afternoon it fled, leaving behind miles of sea covered with the wreckage of the battle, and bearing with it the corpse of its great admiral, who fell by the death he had come to long for--shot mercifully dead by a musket bullet through the heart. He at least had nothing to reproach himself with. All that valour and skill could do to save Holland, he did. If he failed, it was because the mistaken policy of the soldier princes of the House of Nassau, and the unwisdom of the merchant oligarchy, had in false economy supplied him with inferior ships. An Englishman does not undervalue the heroes of his own race, when he acknowledges that not only their valour but skill enabled them to overcome the most famous of the Dutch seamen. We had no prizes, for we burned or sank the ships taken, and our own damage in the battle had not been small, but the victory was decisive. Holland again sued for peace; and as Cromwell had come to recognise that he must not insist on too much, it was finally signed some months later.