1810	Diana and Niobe with Amazone and Eliza	239

capable of holding from 30 to 40 sail of the line with sufficient water at its entrance to float the largest ship when ready for sea, About 20 line-of-battle ships could also anchor in the roadstead. sheltered from every wind, as soon as the dike, then constructing at a vast expense, should be finished. From attacks of another sort the ships were also well defended, the three strong fortifications of Pelée, Fort Napoléon, and Querqueville completely commanding the road. No port belonging to France was so well calculated as Cherbourg, for carrying on offensive operations in the channel ; not only from its centrical and projecting situation, but from the facility with which, with any wind in moderate weather, ships can sail in and out of it. Strong gales from north to north-west would, however, occasion a difficulty in getting out, on account of the heavy swell that such winds usually raise in the principal passage. But it is scarcely possible for one or two ships cruising outside to prevent vessels sailing in the night from Cherbourg, as strong tides, deep water, and a rocky bottom prevent the ships from anchoring ; and they cannot, at all times, keep close enough in to see a vessel under the land. This accounts for the escape of so many French frigates from Cherbourg, until, on the arrival there in the summer of 1809 of the two French line-of-battle ships Courageux and Polonais,* the port became regularly blockaded.

In the autumn of the present year, the British force cruising off the port of Cherbourg consisted of the 74-gun ships Donegal, Captain Pulteney Malcolm, and Revenge, Captain the Honourable Charles Paget ; with occasionally a frigate and a brig-sloop, to be ready to meet the new French 40-gun frigate Iphigénie, launched on the 10th of the preceding May, and a 16-gun brig-corvette, which now lay in company with the two line-of-battle ships, watching an opportunity to sail out. In the middle of October the Alcmène, a second 40-gun frigate from off the stocks in the arsenal, joined the Iphigénie, and was soon in equal readiness for a cruise. In the neighbouring port of Havre, lay also wot two new 40-gun frigates, the Amazone, Captain Bernard-Louis Rousseau, and the Eliza, Captain Louis-Henri Freyeinet-Saulce ; hoping to elude the vigilance of the two British 38-gun frigates, Diana, Captain Charles Grant, and Niobe, Captain John Wentworth Loring, and, at all events, to get to Cherbourg, as the preferable port, although watched by a British force, for an escape to sea.

On the 12th of November, at 10 p.m., favoured by a strong north-east wind, the Amazone and Eliza sailed from Havre, and steered to the north west. At half an hour after midnight, by which time the wind had shifted to north by east, the two French frigates and the Diana and Niobe gained a sight of each other, the two latter to-leeward and in-shore of the former. Captain

See p. 165.

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