One more word of the _Foudroyant_. It would seem as though, in the Portsmouth of these times, we cannot lay the shade of Admiral Byng. The _Foudroyant_ was flagship of the fleet that Byng failed to beat, and Arthur Gardiner, who later commanded the _Monmouth_ when she took the _Foudroyant_, was Byng’s flag-captain. Captain Gardiner, after Byng’s battle, it is said, swore that if ever he got another ship, however small, and met the _Foudroyant_, he would attack her and take her, or sink alongside. He got the _Monmouth_ and met the _Foudroyant_ and kept his word; meeting himself a heroic death on his own quarter-deck in the heat of the battle. A second French man-of-war, taken on the same occasion and also badly mauled—the _Orphèe_, a smart 70-gun ship, prize to the _Revenge_—lies near the _Foudroyant_; also recently brought to England from up the Straits.[8] All the day long there keeps on a continuous passing up and down the harbour of small war-vessels and dockyard craft of every sort. Here a fireship goes by, a small two-masted vessel, readily distinguishable by the heavy iron double hooks and grapnels that tip the yard-arms; and that little boat towing astern. The hooks are meant to grip and hold fast the fireship’s destined prey as she sheers alongside. The fireship’s crew set the quick match-train leading to the stacks of pitch-barrels and other combustibles all over the vessel, ablaze at several points just as they are closing the enemy, and the little boat is for them to escape in at the last moment. Now a bomb-ketch passes, a clumsy craft with masts set well aft and two heavy 13-inch mortars, trained for firing over the bows right ahead, set side by side in the fore part of the ship, where the foremast would stand in an ordinary vessel. A rakish-looking Portsmouth privateer, it may be, now comes by, towing a prize astern of her—some captured French “sugar ship” from Martinique, snapped up off Ushant. Then there passes, on the way to one of the guardships or “receiving” ships, a press-gang tender, coming in from a run along the South Coast. She has been out for some days to pick up hands for the fleet, and some of those on board could tell more than one ugly story of high-handed doings among the villages and farmsteads on the coast, within a night’s march from the sea. In confinement under hatches on board, it is quite possible, is also the unfortunate crew of some homeward-bound merchantman, waylaid and boarded almost within sight of home, off the back of the Isle of Wight. It is very sad, but this is war time, and the fleet must be manned.