Keppel's pet ship, the ever-ready old _Torbay_, came next in the line, with, astern of her, the Anson, a small 64, Captain William Blair--to-day, poor fellow, in his last fight. In the heat of the action a round-shot, sweeping some three feet above the deck, struck Captain Blair at the waist, smashing his body right in two and carrying half of it across the deck and up against the bulwarks on the farther side. The van squadron was completed by the _Fame_, 74, and the _Russell_, Captain James Saumarez, the famous admiral of later days, then a young post-captain twenty-five years old, whom a stroke of unexpected good luck a few weeks before had transferred from a small fireship to the quarter-deck of one of the best line-of-battle ships in Rodney's fleet. Each ship as she reached the spot at which her immediate leader had turned put her helm up sharply and ranged along in the wake of the ship next ahead, firing into every Frenchman that she passed, keeping meanwhile her leader's three masts in one and checking her distance with the sextant. That was at the outset, as they came round and steadied into line alongside the enemy. As the firing became general the smoke, rolling heavily down from windward, smothered the British ships in a dense fog and blanketed them in, shutting out the view all round, except now and again as a glimpse ahead was caught in an occasional rift here and there. Rodney's squadron followed Drake's without a break. The _America_, Captain Thompson, led them, a cable's length astern of the _Russell_. Her name is out of the Navy List now, but it had a meaning of its own in those days, commemorating as it did a former gift of a man-of-war to Great Britain by those colonists of North America who had become since then her deadliest foes. The _Hercules_, 74, commanded by a 'character' of the day, Captain Henry Savage, came next. Her captain's doings that morning were of peculiar interest. Savage took his ship into action with two ensigns up, one nailed to the staff, the other at the peak, with the halyards so belayed that the flag could not easily be hauled down. Beyond a casual gun, he would not let a shot be fired until he had come right abreast of the French admiral. Then he opened with a full broadside into the _Ville de Paris_, every gun double-shotted, at less than 50 yards. Not thirty seconds elapsed between the first gun and the last, said the _Hercules'_ first lieutenant. As the men reloaded, Captain Savage, who, a martyr to gout, had been sitting in an arm-chair on deck waving his hat and calling out uncomplimentary epithets to the Frenchmen as he passed each ship, forgetting his pain in his excitement, jumped on an arm chest and struck up a line of a song of the day-- Oh! what a charming thing's a battle!