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A warship comes on under full sail with her guns firing. She is the Royal George, Hawke's flagship. She rolled over at her own anchor 23 years later, with hundreds of visitors aboard.

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. All summer, Admiral Sir Edward Hawke kept it shut in port by doing something no navy had managed before: he held squadrons on station week after week without a break. Supply ships fed and watered them at sea, and the men's health was run like a supply problem of its own. In mid-November a gale finally blew Hawke off his post. Conflans came out with 21 ships of the line and ran south for Quiberon Bay, a bay full of reefs and shoals with the wind blowing straight onto the rocks. 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 wind strong enough to take the masts out of a ship. His own sailing master is supposed to have stated the obvious: rocks, sands, and no local 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, with the light already going. The fighting was at close range in a heavy sea. The Thésée sank in minutes: she opened her lower gunports to fight, the water came straight in, and 600 men went down with her. The Superbe went under after two broadsides. The French flagship Soleil Royal ran aground in the night and was burned by her own crew. 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, and never revived. The year 1759 had already brought Quebec and Minden, and the British called it the wonderful year. The song written that autumn to celebrate it, Heart of Oak, is still the Royal Navy's official march. Quiberon settled two larger questions as well. A fleet could be kept at sea for as long as it took. And there was now a navy that would follow an enemy anywhere, including places nobody sane sailed in November. Nicholas Pocock was not at Quiberon Bay. He was commanding merchant ships in 1759, and only turned painter years later. He made this canvas 53 years after the battle, for a public that already knew the line by heart, and he gave the storm as much of the picture as the enemy.