Are they daft?" Lieutenant Langlie, the First Officer, commented as he lowered his telescope, after watching the nearest brace of Dutch sloops open fire on Venerable and Triumph.

"Perhaps more desperate than daft, Mister Langlie," Lewrie said as he stepped back towards the wheel and compass binnacle. "If they've waited so long for the winds to shift, so they can come out, maybe cooperate in some French intrigue based in the Channel ports… well, this fat Dutch mynheer de Wynter can't run back into harbour without being seen doing something!"

They watched as HMS Triumph yawed to show more of her starboard beam, opening the limited arcs of her guns, as she intersected the enemy's line. With a titanic roar, she opened with a full broadside, the first and the most carefully aimed and laid in any battle, at the next Dutch ship astern of the one already pummeled by Venerable. That was a deathblow of 32-pounder and upper gundeck 18-pounder iron shot that tore giant gouges and eruptions of side-timbers, that harvested upper yards and masts in an eyeblink! They could hear horrid thuds or howls of rivened wood, as scantlings and beams shattered.

"Do we sail on like this, we'll mask her guns," Lewrie decided aloud, to his quarterdeck officers. "Let's bear up to windward, three points or so, Mister Langlie, and pass upwind of her."

"Aye, sir."

"Deck, there!" a lookout, high aloft on the mainmast, shouted down to them. "Two Dutch brigs alee… four points off t'starboard bows!"