It was on these depositions, together with those of Captain Foster and his assistants, that the Admiralty Court at Gibraltar condemned the ship as "good prize," and with perfect justice; had any ground existed for protest, it should then have been put forward; so the flagrant injustice and iniquity of the Spanish authorities is very apparent. There had been other complaints previously, and the British Ambassador at Madrid had very strongly protested against the favour shown by the Spaniards to French privateers, and had also induced Pitt, the Prime Minister, to support him in a strong letter. But it was all of no avail: there were wheels within wheels, and, rather than make it an occasion of war, the just claims of the Antigallicans were suffered to go by the board. [Footnote 8: Inside Isle de Rhé, off the coast of France, close to La Rochelle.] [Footnote 9: Perhaps Mr. William Foster is responsible for the story here told by the Antigallican narrator, that Anson "had no hand in the matter. That morning he desired a council of war, but Sir Peter Warren told him, 'There are French colours flying! which is a sufficient council of war'; and so bore down upon them, while his lordship lay at a distance." Anson, however, received his peerage for this very action--he was not "his lordship" when he fought it; Warren was knighted at the same time.] CHAPTER VIII CAPTAIN DEATH, OF THE "TERRIBLE" One of the bloodiest privateer actions on record was that between the _Terrible_, owned in London, and the _Vengeance_, of St. Malo. The _Terrible_ carried 26 guns, with a crew of 200 men, and was commanded by Captain Death. She was cruising off the mouth of the Channel at the end of the year 1756, and had had some success, capturing an armed French cargo ship, the _Alexandre le Grand_, (the narrator very simply translates this "Grand Alexander"!), which she was escorting into Plymouth, with a prize crew of an officer--the first lieutenant--and fifteen men, when on December 27th, at daylight, two sails were sighted to the southward, about twelve miles distant. Some communication was observed to take place between the two vessels, and then the larger one steered for the _Terrible_ and her prize, which was far astern, so that the _Terrible_ was obliged to back her mizzen-topsail and wait for her. Meanwhile, every preparation was made for action; but, from the absence of the prize crew and other causes, no more than 116 men out of 200 were able to stand to the guns; indeed, the narrator, who was third lieutenant of the _Terrible_, tells rather a sad story of her crew--"the rest being either dead or sick below with a distemper called the spotted fever, that raged among the ship's company." This may have been malignant typhus, or the plague, terribly infectious; and there would be great reluctance to handle the dead bodies--hence some of these were left below.