the admiral and his gallant companions fighting for their lives. At the instant of boarding, Charrau, who had forgotten his pistol, sent a servant back for it. When the man had found it he was unable to rejoin his master owing to the distance between the vessels. The admiral and his followers were quickly driven overboard by the pikes of the Frenchmen, and nearly all were drowned. Charrau's servant saw the admiral swimming, and hailing his galley to come to him. When he saw that he could not be saved, he took off his chain of gold nobles and his gold whistle of office, and threw them from him, so that the insignia of an English admiral, even after his death, might not fall into the hands of the enemy. After that he disappeared.
A second English craft came up, but her commander being killed, she retired. Cheyne, Wallop, Sydney and Sherburn all arrived not long afterwards; and the two latter boarded Prégent and did him some damage; but, seeing that the other vessels had withdrawn, and not knowing that the Lord High Admiral had ever quitted his galley, they also withdrew and rejoined the fleet.
For a short time Howard's fate was in doubt. To ascertain it, Cheyne, Cromwell, and Wallop presently went ashore in a boat under a flag of truce; and, upon hearing of their arrival, Prégent rode down on horseback to meet them. He assured them that his only prisoner was a seaman, but added that an officer with a gilt shield on his arm had boarded him, and had been thrust into the sea by the pikes; and that the prisoner declared this officer to have been the English admiral.
Lord Ferrers, in the second English galley, had engaged the other French vessels, but, after expending all his powder and shot and two hundred sheafs of arrows, saw that the admiral's galley had relinquished the combat, and followed it out of action.
On Saturday, April 30th, the fleet, in mourning, reached Plymouth; and on the following day it disembarked its sick, two of whom, according to Echyngham,[1] fell dead as they landed.
Echyngham makes some suggestive comments on this lamentable disaster. He says that after Howard's death it was the unanimous wish of the fleet that the king would send it a commander who, in addition to noble birth, should possess wisdom and firmness, and who should make himself equally loved and feared, no fleet having ever been more in need of a man who would keep it in good order.
- ↑ Upon whose letter the above account is chiefly based.
