It was of course quite dark when the battle at close quarters began--half-past eight on a February evening. The moon, within two days of the last quarter, would not rise till between eleven and midnight. Each ship, however, had her distinguishing lights hoisted, and the gleam of the battle-lanterns through the _Foudroyant's_ ports gave the _Monmouth's_ men sufficient mark to lay their guns by. More they did not want. The _Swiftsure_ at this time was about nine miles off, as her log notes, steering for the spot by the flash of the guns. The _Hampton Court_ was a couple of miles or so astern of the _Swiftsure_. The enemy, for their part, with their heavier guns, smote the _Monmouth_ hard and answered back her fire with equal spirit. Even now though, the French commodore would not risk bringing-to for a space and making an effort to get the _Monmouth_ fairly under his broadside, where his crushing superiority in gun-power might well have been decisive. He held on instead, drifting slowly before the light wind, fighting as he went. So far there was little to disquiet M. du Quesne in the way that things were going. As a fact, during the first hour, the terrific punishment that the _Foudroyant's_ 42-pounders were able to inflict told heavily on the _Monmouth_, and it looked as though the _Foudroyant_ could well hold her own to the end. Captain Gardiner, however, stuck to his task unflinchingly. All the time an incessant fire of musketry was kept up from the _Foudroyant's_ tops, and from her towering bulwarks, which were lined with soldiers all along the length of the ship. They did considerable execution among the men at the upper-deck guns, and, among their other victims, wounded Captain Gardiner himself with a musket bullet through the arm. It was an ugly wound, but the gallant captain of the _Monmouth_ refused to quit the deck, and had the wound bound up as he stood. This was about a quarter to nine. Fate, however, unhappily had more in store for Arthur Gardiner that night. At half-past nine, the captain received a second and a mortal wound. 'Captain Gardiner received a mortal wound which obliged him to be conveyed off the deck,' Lieutenant Carkett briefly records. A grape-shot struck Gardiner on the forehead, according to the journal of Lieutenant Baron,[6] the third lieutenant, and he was carried below insensible, to linger in the cockpit until four next morning, when he died, 'having been speechless since he received his wound.'