The _Warren Hastings_, after leaving Portsmouth on the day mentioned, made a safe and uneventful passage to China and duly began her return journey. But this time she was armed not quite so strongly. Four of her main-deck ports had been caulked up so as to afford additional space for a storeroom, and the four guns had been put away in the hold. Nor had she so good a crew, for forty Chinamen had decided to remain at Canton, and there was the usual impressment from the British navy, a warship relieving the _Warren Hastings_ of eighteen English seamen: and you can be sure they were some of the best men in the ship. In addition to the four guns already mentioned, four of the 18-pounder carronades were also transferred to the hold. The net result was that when she put to sea for her homeward voyage she mounted 36 guns only and carried a crew of 138 men and boys.
It was on the 21st of June at 7.30 in the morning that, while this ship was foaming along under a smart press of canvas before a strong breeze, she descried a strange ship under treble-reefed topsails and courses. This turned out to be the French frigate _Piémontaise_ of 40 guns, commanded by Captain Jacques Epron. This ship was armed rather differently from the rest of French frigates which were so famous at this period, and as we are about to watch the contest between her and the Indiaman it will be well to notice these details. The _Piémontaise_ had the usual twenty-eight long 18-pounders on her main-deck. On her quarter-deck and forecastle she mounted ten iron and two brass 36-pounder carronades, two long French 8-pounders, and four long English 9-pounders, these having belonged to the British frigate _Jason_, which had been compelled to throw them overboard when she grounded off Pointe de la Trenche at the capture of the Seine in 1798.
In addition to her forty-six carriage guns, the Frenchmen also carried swivel guns and musketoons in her tops and along her gunwales. On each fore and main yard-arm there was fixed a tripod to contain a shell weighing a quarter of a ton, the idea being that when in combat she got alongside another ship, the shell was to have its fuse lighted by a man lying out on the yard. It would then be thrown from the tripod, fall on the enemy’s deck, pass through to the deck below, and then exploding would cause wholesale destruction. Meanwhile, the French crew would rush on board, profiting by this confusion, and the capture of the Frenchman’s enemy would be an easier matter. The French crew would also be armed each with a dagger in the buttonholes of his jacket in addition to the boarding-pike which he would hold in his hand. These tactics were, even at the beginning of the nineteenth century, a curious survival of the mediæval methods of fighting. Gunnery was not the chief reliance, but was looked upon merely as a means for quelling the enemy so that she might be boarded and a hand-to-hand fight begun. It seems strange in this twentieth century, when a battleship would open fire at six miles and be pretty sure to keep a good distance from its opponent, that the older fashion should have survived so long. If the French frigates of yesterday were the German light cruisers of to-day, and the old East Indiamen were the crack ships of the Cunard Line of the P. & O., the latter could, if desired, be attacked and sunk without the vessels ever getting within several miles of each other, let alone any thought of boarding, unless the German was determined to spare human life, keep within the limits of international law and take the merchant ship captive. Thus have the conditions changed in the course of time.