"
The enemy's long boat put out with a crew four times that of the brig.
Within a quarter of an hour the Englishmen had all been transferred to
the _Louis Treize_, and an officer and half a dozen men left in charge
of the prize. The Frenchman at once set a course for Dunkirk, and,
with a spanking breeze behind her, she made the port in fifteen hours.
The noon of the next day saw George Fairburn and his companions
clapped into a French prison.
"A bonny come off," the old skipper grumbled, "but we shall ha' to
make the best on it."
It will not be forgotten that the war just begun was, to put it
bluntly, a war to determine which of two indifferent princes, Philip
of France and Charles of Austria, should have the Spanish crown. Lord
Peterborough declared that it was not worth his country's while to
fight for such "a pair of louts."
[Illustration: "Now!" came the order.]
Into the war, however, England had thrown herself, under the direction
of Harley, the famous Tory minister now in power, at home, and with
Marlborough as commander-in-chief of both the English and the Dutch
forces abroad. The General's first aim was to take back from Louis XIV
all those fortresses in the Spanish Netherlands which had been seized
and garrisoned by the French troops as if the country were a French
possession.
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