Fortune's favors are thrown away, as though in mockery, on the incompetent or the irresolute.

On the 22d of July a fresh north-east wind concurred with a spring tide to give the highest possible water on the bar.[26] "At eight o'clock," wrote an eye-witness in the British fleet, "d'Estaing with all his squadron appeared under way.

He kept working to windward, as if to gain a proper position for crossing the bar by the time the tide should serve.

The wind could not be more favourable for such a design; it blew from the exact point from which he could attack us to the greatest advantage.

The spring tides were at the highest, and that afternoon thirty feet on the bar.