It was not until some little time after their collision that the _Montagu_ and the two other British ships, the _Warspite_ and the _Magnanime_, got clear of one another. By that time they had drifted to leeward of the _Formidable_, and were too far off to reopen their attack. But fresh foes for the brave de Verger’s ship were soon at hand.
First of these the _Torbay_, Commodore Keppel’s ship, a smart and powerful seventy-four, ranged alongside. Setting-to briskly by himself, Keppel gave the Frenchmen a cruelly trying quarter of an hour, after which the _Resolution_ and the _Swiftsure_, both seventy-gun ships, drew near to take their part. Keppel, according to his own log, “had silenced her,” and without waiting to see her colours come down, as the new arrivals neared the spot he moved off, intent on finding a single-handed fight for himself further ahead.
Keppel did so immediately, and settled the fate of the hapless _Thesèe_, a seventy-four, the same size as his own ship, which went to the bottom with awful suddenness as they were fighting yard-arm to yard-arm, struck by a fierce squall that burst on her and heeled her over just as she had opened her lower-deck ports to leeward in order to give the _Torbay_ a broadside. Swamped by a tremendous sea, the luckless _Thesèe_ filled and sank like a stone. Out of eight hundred men on board, not twenty in all were saved, picked up from floating wreckage. The _Torbay_ herself narrowly escaped sharing the _Thesèe’s_ fate. Her lower-deck ports had just been opened too. “Keppel’s,” relates Horace Walpole, “was full of water, and he thought he was sinking; a sudden squall emptied his ship, but he was informed all his powder was wet. ‘Then,’ said he, ‘I am sorry I am safe.’ They came and told him a small quantity was undamaged. ‘Very well,’ said he, ‘then attack again.’”
The _Resolution_ and _Swiftsure_ were in turn joined by the _Revenge_, and then the _Essex_ added herself to the long suffering _Formidable’s_ foes. Still, though, the _Formidable_ kept her colours flying, while shot after shot—at intervals—came sullenly from her tiers of ports. She was practically silenced, but not as Keppel had thought, absolutely. There was little satisfaction in such odds, and three of the British ships moved away, leaving the _Resolution_ to finish the business off.