It was also adopted in the _Formidable_, in which ship Sir Charles fought as first captain to Admiral Rodney in the great fight which took place three years after the above was written. At the Battle of the Saints not a single goose-quill failed in the _Formidable_, nor did a gun require to be wormed so long as the flannel-bottomed cartridges held out. Of the hundred and twenty-six locks fitted in the _Duke_, only one failed; with this exception a single Kentish black flint served for each gun throughout the whole engagement. The oblique fire which our ships were enabled to employ so shattered the enemy by the unexpectedly rapid and concentrated fire poured into him, that victory was not left long in doubt; the toll of his killed and wounded was enormous. The _Duke_, it was reckoned, fired twice as many effective shots as would have been possible under the old system. The _Formidable_ reported that two, and sometimes three, broadsides were fired at every passing Frenchman before he could bring a gun to bear in reply.[97] If all the ships of the fleet, it was said, had been able to use their guns as they were used in these two, very few of the enemy would have escaped. The advantage accruing to the British fleets from the improvements initiated and developed by Sir Charles Douglas and other captains of his time was palpable and undisputed. It is possible, however, that the total effect produced by all these developments in gunnery material, both in this action and in those of the following war, may have been insufficiently emphasized by historians? It is to the war which broke out with the United States of America in 1812 that we must turn to see the truck equipment working at its highest point of efficiency. By this time the advantage of gun-sights[98] for giving accuracy of aim has been seized by a few individual officers, and sights of various patterns have been fitted by enthusiasts. No official encouragement is given, however, to experiments with sights and scales and disparting devices, and once again it is left to private initiative and expense to make a further advance toward efficiency. Applications for gun-sights are rejected during the war on the ground that these novelties are “not according to the regulation of the Service.”[99] These are the circumstances in which a certain vessel in the royal navy exhibits such a superiority in gunnery over her contemporaries as to render her conspicuous at the time and, for several decades afterwards, the accepted model by which all such as care may measure themselves.