a lieutenant on HMS Culloden at the time, had been an eyewitness to the sinking – to publicly challenge Carlyle's tale. Carlyle set out to get to the bottom of the story, eventually unearthing the official report of Vengeur's captain, Renaudin. Carlyle concluded that Barère had concocted a "cunningly devised fable", and changed his account of the sinking of the Vengeur in subsequent editions.In later editions of The French Revolution: A History, Carlyle added a paragraph that dismisses his own previous account. See for instance the Centenary Edition, p.242 The three most serious reports of the events are the report of Jean François Renaudin, captain of Vengeur, written in captivity on 1 Messidor an II (19 June 1794), signed by Renaudin, Jean Hugine, Louis Rousseau, Pelet, Trouvée, Lussot and others, then in British custody in Tavistock;Diaz de Soria, Le Marseillois, p. 19 and following the report of Cyprien Renaudin, first officer of Vengeur (and cousin to Jean François Renaudin), which was found around 1929 in family archives; and later accounts written in 1838 by Rear-admiral John Griffiths, who had witnessed the event 44 years earlier. In French drawings, Vengeur is often depicted as flying the Tricolour, which had been recently ordered by the Convention to be flown as battle ensign; however, due to a lack of bunting in Brest, Villaret had not been able to distribute this flag to all his ships, and thus Vengeur probably still flew the white flag with a canton of three equal columns of red, white, and blue. The notion that the ship would have nailed her flag and never surrendered, as Barère claimed, is never accounted in any of the reports. Though Jean François Renaudin never explicitly states that he surrendered, he does mention that he had his flag flown half-mast in distress when he was surrounded by British ships, indicating that he was requesting assistance from the enemy.Guérin, vol.6, p.505, note 37 Griffiths observes that Vengeur was dismasted to the point that there would have been nothing on which to nail a flag anyway, and James makes mentions of Vengeur hoisting the Union Jack in submission. The exact cause of the sinking was also the subject of dispute. Barère's account describes Vengeur as sinking from the shots that would have holed her hull; actually, Cyprien Renaudin mentions only two such holes in the lower hull of Vengeur and a noise "like a strong