But now the Reverend Thomas Prince's litany, rhymed by a later bard, summed up the gist of all the supplications that ascended from the Puritans: O Lord! We would not advise; But if, in Thy Providence, A Tempest should arise, To drive the French fleet hence, And scatter it far and wide, Or sink it in the sea, We should be satisfied, And Thine the Glory be. Strange to say, this pious suggestion had been mostly answered before it had been made. Disaster after disaster fell upon the doomed French fleet from the very day it sailed. The admiral was the Duc d'Anville, one of the illustrious La Rochefoucaulds, whose family name is known wherever French is read. He was not wanting either in courage or good sense; but, like his fleet, he had little experience at sea. The French ships, as usual, were better than the British. But the French themselves were a nation of landsmen. They had no great class of seamen to draw upon at will, a fact which made an average French crew inferior to an average British one. This was bad enough. But the most important point of all was that their fleets were still worse than their single ships. The British always had fleets at sea, constantly engaged in combined manoeuvres. The French had not; and, in face of the British command of the sea, they could not have them. The French harbours were watched so closely that the French fleets were often attacked and defeated before they had begun to learn how to work together. Consequently, they found it still harder to unite two different fleets against their almost ubiquitous enemy. D'Anville's problem was insoluble from the start, Four large men-of-war from the West Indies were to join him at Chibucto Bay, now the harbour of Halifax, under Admiral Conflans, the same who was defeated by Hawke in Quiberon Bay thirteen years later, on the very day that Wolfe was buried. Each contributory part of the great French naval plan failed in the working out. D'Anville's command was a collection of ships, not a co-ordinated fleet. The French dockyards had been neglected; so some of the ships were late, which made it impossible to practise manoeuvres before sailing for the front. Then, in the bungling hurry of fitting out, the hulls of several vessels were left foul, which made them dull sailers; while nearly all the holds were left unscoured, which, of course, helped to propagate the fevers, scurvy, plague, and pestilence brought on by bad food badly stowed. Nor was this all. Officers who had put in so little sea time with working fleets were naturally slack and inclined to be discontented. The fact that they were under sealed orders, which had been communicated only to d'Anville, roused their suspicions while his weakness in telling them they were bound for Louisbourg almost produced a mutiny.