How the British Navy came by its first _Formidable_ man-of-war, the predecessor in the direct line of the fine first-class battleship, the _Formidable_ of our modern Navy, is one of the most exciting tales in our naval annals. It serves too to commemorate one of the most brilliant victories ever won at sea—the dashing encounter on that eventful winter’s afternoon in the Bay of Biscay, “When Hawke came swooping from the West”:— ’Twas long past noon of a wild November day When Hawke came swooping from the West; He heard the breakers thundering in Quiberon Bay, But he flew the flag for battle, line abreast. Down upon the quicksands, roaring out of sight, Fiercely beat the storm-wind, darkly fell the night. But they took the foe for pilot and the cannon’s glare for light, When Hawke came swooping from the West. How the _Formidable_ passed that day from France to England is, indeed, something of which both England and France may be jointly proud. Never fought men more heroically on both sides—the enemy to keep, we to take—amid all the horrors of a furious storm and ever imminent shipwreck and catastrophe. This is the story of how, where, and when the Royal Navy won its first _Formidable_, the first of a famous line. It was the afternoon of the 20th of November, 1759, a Tuesday. The scene was among the black-fanged reefs of granite rock, and the treacherous quicksands that fringe the “sickle-shaped sweep” of Quiberon Bay on the coast of the Morbihan, in Lower Brittany, in the north-eastern quarter of the Bay of Biscay. The battle was fought in the height of a wild raging storm from the Atlantic, a tremendous gale from the north-west, howling blasts of wind, and torrents of hissing rain, and thick, dark weather, with the sea lashed to fury all round, and gigantic breakers running “so high that no boat could live for a moment among them,” as one who was present described. “A network of shoals and sandbanks” is what a French writer calls Quiberon Bay, “with heavy surf breaking along the shore on the calmest days of summer, and ugly cross-currents swirling to and fro with the strength and rush of a mill race”; a place “lined with reefs that the navigator never sees without alarm, and never passes without emotion.” Hawke and his captains swept down on the French fleet, cornered between the storm and the shore, in the midst of the rocks and quicksands; without charts themselves, and for the most part without pilots, or, at least, pilots that they could trust; flinging themselves on the enemy heedless of gale and breakers, attacking ship after ship of the French as each was met with, “to make,” in Hawke’s own expressive words, “downright work of them.”