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Hawke's flagship takes the center under shot-torn sails. The Royal George would sink at her own anchor twenty-three years later, another story on this wall.

In 1759 France's plan for winning the Seven Years' War was to land an army in Britain, and the flat-bottomed boats were actually built, waiting in the Morbihan. The escort was to be the Brest fleet under Marshal Conflans, and all summer Admiral Sir Edward Hawke kept it bottled in port with something no navy had sustained before: a continuous close blockade, squadrons on station week after week, fed and watered by a conveyor of supply ships, sailors' health managed like logistics. In mid-November a gale finally blew Hawke off his post, and Conflans came out with 21 of the line, running south for Quiberon Bay, where the charts grow teeth: reefs, shoals, and a lee shore. He was certain of one thing above all, that no admiral would follow him in there, in a rising November storm, without local pilots, with the light failing. Hawke arrived off the bay in the early afternoon of 20 November carrying full sail in winds that were dismasting weather, and his own sailing master is supposed to have put the obvious to him: that this was a shore of rocks and sands with no pilot aboard. The reply, in the version the navy chose to remember, has outlived every chart of the bay: where there is a passage for the enemy, there is a passage for me. The British fleet went in through the entrance under storm canvas, among breakers, in the dark of the year, and the battle happened at close range in 40-foot seas. The Thésée sank in minutes when she opened her lower gunports to fight and the sea accepted the invitation, taking 600 men; the Superbe went down under two broadsides; the French flagship Soleil Royal grounded in the night and was burned by her own people. About 2,500 French sailors drowned against a few hundred British lost, mostly on two ships that found the shoals. The invasion of Britain was cancelled, permanently as it turned out, and the year 1759, already carrying Quebec and Minden, closed as the annus mirabilis; the song written that autumn to celebrate it, Heart of Oak, is still the Royal Navy's official march. Quiberon settled something larger than the campaign: that a blockading fleet could be kept at sea indefinitely, and that there was now a navy prepared to follow you anywhere at all, including places sane men did not sail in November. Nicholas Pocock, who had commanded merchant ships himself before he ever sold a painting, made the canvas decades later for a public that already knew the line the picture illustrates: the storm given equal billing with the enemy, and both of them losing.