But Jack the Painter’s time had not yet come. Nothing in the way of incendiarism happened at Chatham, or at any of the other dockyards in 1764, and after two or three months of unrest, things resumed their normal state of tranquillity. Nothing more happened after that to hinder or delay the completion of the _Victory_, and by the following March her bulkheads and magazines were fitted, the port-lids and the rudder hung, and the poop lanterns in place, and the caulkers and painters were getting through with their finishing touches. On St. George’s day, April 23rd, 1765, the Commissioner at Chatham reported the _Victory_ to the Admiralty as ready to be launched. The requisite order in reply, dispatched through the Navy Board, arrived on the 30th of April. It directed the launch to take place at the next spring tides These were due on the 7th of May. VII ON VALENTINE’S NIGHT IN FRIGATE BAY If we go forward, we die; If we go backward, we die; Better go forward—and live! The story of what happened once in Frigate Bay, St. Kitts, in the West Indies, recalls one of our “forgotten glories”; a feat of arms that nine out of ten people, one may be quite certain, have never heard of. Nor do our general histories say much of it, even of those whose pages make reference to it. Yet it is one of the very smartest, and neatest, and cleverest displays that, it may be, any British Admiral ever made, and it was managed, too, in the face of heroic odds. In every sense it was a daring and dashing deed of arms, and its moral effect on the enemy at the time was immense and widespread. It was in February of the year 1782, in the closing year of England’s long war with France and Spain in alliance with the rebel American Colonists. At that moment the French under the Comte de Grasse were in overpowering force in the West Indies, and were about, as they loudly vaunted, to make a sweeping attack on the five remaining British Islands, which, they declared openly, would prove an easy prey. Rodney, the British Commander-in-Chief in the West Indies, had gone home on sick leave for a short time at the end of the preceding season. He was now on his way out again, with what reinforcements the sorely-tried Admiralty, at their wits’ end for ships and the men to man them with, could get together for him; but he had not yet arrived. Sir Samuel Hood (the famous Lord Hood of a later day), Rodney’s second in command, was in charge of the station in Rodney’s absence. It was by him that the brilliant exploit which forms our story here was achieved in Frigate Bay, St. Kitts.