By 9.30 the two fleets were within gunshot of each other and Lord Howe ordered the signal for close action to be hoisted at the mizenmast of his flagship. This was signal number 5, a distinctive red-and-white-quartered flag which signified 'To engage the enemy. If closer a red pennant will be shown over the flag.' Howe made sure that the red pennant was duly hoisted. Codrington was with the Admiral on the quarterdeck at this moment and observed him shut the little signal book which he always carried with him, and turn to the officers surrounding him, saying, 'And now, gentlemen, no more book, no more signals. I look to you to do the duty of the Queen Charlotte in engaging the French admiral. I do not wish the ships to be bilge and bilge, but if you can lock the yardarms so much the better, the battle will be sooner decided.' He then took over conning the ship, just as he had done thirty-five years before at the Battle of Quiberon Bay when he had steered the Magnanime among the treacherous shoals on the French coast in a November gale. He now headed for the centre of the French line and selected as his adversary the Montagne, a three-decker of 120 guns and the flagship of Admiral Villaret-Joyeuse.
From his viewpoint on the frigate Pegasus, Nicholas Pocock was well placed to observe the opening stages of the battle. The third of his aerial views shows the scene at 10.30 in the morning. The battle has been raging for about an hour. The Queen Charlotte has hauled up under the stern of the Montagne and her foretopmast is going over the side. Dense clouds of gunsmoke have already hidden many of the ships of the line from view. Standing well clear of the action in the foreground are five of the British frigates, the fireship Comet, the cutter Rattler, and the hospital ship Charon. The Pegasus is in the centre of the picture, in a position where she can repeat Howe's signals.
In this picture, as in his other three aerial views, Pocock has taken a bird's eye view of the entire scene rather than a literal view of what he would have seen from the masthead of the Pegasus. It was his usual practice before he began work on a painting of a sea battle to produce a careful plan of the action so that he could check the positions of the ships and the direction of wind and tide with people who had been present. In his First of June Notebook he used his own observations to produce what amounted to three-dimensional plans of the action. A few years later, when he was commissioned to paint pictures of Nelson's famous victories at the Nile, Copenhagen and Trafalgar, he chose to paint similar aerial views of the actions, presumably because these gave the spectator a clear and easily understood view of the relative positions of all the ships involved.
In addition to the aerial views, Pocock also made dozens of sketches of the battle on 1 June from the decks of the Pegasus. Like his distinguished predecessor Willem van de Velde the Elder, who was present at several of the battles of the Anglo-Dutch Wars, he used pen and pencil with the addition of a rapidly applied grey wash. This enabled him to depict the flash of cannon fire, the billowing smoke, the falling masts and spars, and the choppy surface of the sea with a freshness and a sense of immediacy which is missing from so many of the battle pictures by his contemporaries. Unfortunately on 1 June the Bellerophon was too far away from Pocock to be seen clearly and she only appears in his bird's eye views.
When the British fleet sailed down on the enemy in line abreast the Bellerophon was at one end of the line with only the Caesar outside her. As they neared the French line Captain Molloy in the Caesar began firing at long range but then held back. (This led to much hostile criticism afterwards and a court martial.) The Caesar's absence meant that the fire of several French ships was directed at the Bellerophon as she made her final approach. According to Captain Hope, 'in going down we received a very heavy fire from 3 or 4 of the enemies van'. The officers on the quarterdeck were always in a dangerously exposed position and they now came under a murderous hail of musket balls and cannon shot. Shortly before 11 o'clock Admiral Pasley was hit. According to Matthew Flinders, the future explorer who was a midshipman on the Bellerophon, 'our brave admiral lost his leg by an 18 pound shot which came through the barricadoes of the quarter-deck - it was in the heat of the action.' When two of his seamen expressed their sorrow at seeing him wounded Pasley briskly replied, 'Thank you, but never mind my leg: take care of my flag.'
The Admiral was taken below where Alexander White, the surgeon, found his leg was so shattered that it had to be amputated. We get a rare glimpse of what the atmosphere below deck must have been like at this time in a letter written by Jonathan Wilkinson, a 28-year-old seaman serving on another ship, the 98-gun Queen. Before joining the navy Wilkinson had worked on a farm in Nottinghamshire and his letter was addressed to his former employer.
'Sir, in the time of the action you would have thought the element had been all on fire and the shot flying about our heads 42 pounder and case shot and double-headed shot. It was all the same as a hail storm.' Wilkinson described how the Queen had to run the gauntlet through the French lines and 'at the gun that I was quartered at we had 4 shot come in and killed two men and wounded five ditto which I was wounded in my left arm and in my breast but thanks be to God I'm a great deal better and to let you know that our captain lost his leg and is since dead and the master of the ship he was killed right out in the time of action . . .'
While Admiral Pasley was on the surgeon's makeshift operating table, Captain Hope continued to give orders from the quarterdeck and the Bellerophon's gun crews continued to thunder away at the enemy ships on either side. The bombardment was so effective that the captain of the French 74-gun ship L'Eole decided that his ship had taken enough punishment and withdrew from the line of battle. By this time the Bellerophon had lost all three of her topmasts, most of her lower shrouds were shot away, and her mainsail was shot to pieces. Unable to manoeuvre the ship any more, Captain Hope had to signal to the frigate Latona to come to her assistance and tow her clear. As they emerged from the pall of gunsmoke Captain Hope counted eleven ships without a mast standing, one of them being the Defence, a seventy-four designed by Slade and a sister ship of the Bellerophon.
Nicholas Pocock witnessed the heroic performance of the Defence and later produced a small oil painting of her under fire from two French ships. It is one of the most authentic depictions of a sea battle ever painted. It has none of the theatrical glamour of Philippe Jacques de Loutherbourg's vast canvas, The Glorious First of June, but it does have a deadpan realism and a mastery of significant detail which could only come from the hand of someone who had witnessed the occasion. Captain Gambier in command of the Defence had piled on so much sail during the approach to the enemy that his ship drew ahead of the British line and came under a concentrated hail of fire as she reached the French line. First she lost her mizenmast and then her mainmast, but even when her foremast was shot away and her deck was strewn with wreckage, her gun crews continued to keep up a barrage of fire. Midshipman Dillon observed that 'The lower deck was at times so completely filled with smoke that we could scarcely distinguish each other, and the guns were so heated that, when fired, they nearly kicked the upper deck beams.' At one stage Dillon was standing next to a seaman called John Polly who was so short that he was confident that any shot would pass harmlessly over his head.