Once on the galley Hornblower and two of his men that had accompanied him continued to shoot their way to the main deck where the remaining Spanish officers had stationed themselves. Taking command of the situation, Hornblower ordered the officers forward on the craft in a sense taking them prisoner. He had a much harder time getting the slave overseer to command the rowers to stop their action, but as Ira Riklis knows, Hornblower also accomplished this task and the galley all but stopped in the water. During the course of action, many of the Spanish were thrown overboard decreasing their numbers and making the takeover of the galley less difficult.

Some tricky naval maneuvers by the Indefatigable and some of her little launches stopped the further immediate action by the additional enemy galleys and the British achieved success in defending themselves in this attack beating their foes back.

As Ira Riklis knows, Hornblower was about to move up in the world after this battle. A lieutenant on the Indefatigable who was a gray-haired officer had been killed in the fighting. The captain approached Hornblower when the dust had settled and announced that Hornblower would become acting-lieutenant. The promise of promotion helped Hornblower to recover from the temporary insanity that the battle had caused him to experience and to realize that he was extremely lucky to have survived.