For four hours the battle raged. “The ships were so close, shout and counter-shout could be heard across decks. Faces were singed with the closeness of the musketry fire. Ninety French had been wounded. The _Pelican’s_ decks swam in blood that froze to ice, slippery as glass, and trickled down the clinker boards in reddening splashes. Grape shot and grenade had set the fallen sails on fire. Sails and mast poles and splintered davits were a mass of roaring flame that would presently extend to the powder magazines and blow all to eternity. . . . Still the batterymen below poured their storm of fire and bomb into the English hull. The fighters were so close, one old record says, and the holes torn by the bombs so large in the hull of each ship, that the gunners on the _Pelican_ were looking into the eyes of the smoke-grimed men below the decks of the _Hampshire_. For three hours the English had tacked to board the _Pelican_, and for three hours the mastless, splintered _Pelican_ had fought like a demon to cripple her enemy’s approach. The blood-grimed, half-naked men had rushed _en masse_ for the last leap, the hand-to-hand fight, when a frantic shout went up. . . . The batteries of the _Hampshire_ had suddenly silenced. The great ship refused to answer to the wheel. That persistent, undeviating fire bursting from the sides of the _Pelican_ had done its work. The _Hampshire_ gave a quick, back lurch. Before the amazed Frenchmen could believe their senses, amid the roar of flame and crashing billows and hiss of fires extinguished in an angry sea, the _Hampshire_, all sails set, settled and sank like a stone amid the engulfing billows. Not a soul of her two hundred and fifty men—one hundred and ninety mariners and servants, with sixty soldiers—escaped. “The screams of the struggling seamen had not died on the waves before Iberville had turned the batteries of his shattered ship full force on Smithsend’s _Hudson’s Bay_. Promptly the _Hudson’s Bay_ struck colours, but while Iberville was engaged boarding his captive and taking over ninety prisoners, Grimmington on the _Dering_ showed swift heel and gained refuge in Fort Nelson.”