Late at night the French rear line attempted to break out. Apart from the galleys only 17 other French ships escaped. The English captured 166 French merchant ships. The remaining 24 ships of the French fleet were sunk or burnt. Few, if any, prisoners were taken and the water was thick with blood and corpses. French losses were between 16,000 and 20,000 killed, a high proportion of these by drowning. The two French commanders were both captured and Béhuchet was hanged from the mast of his own ship, while Quiéret was beheaded, in vengeance for the massacre they had overseen at Arnemuiden two years earlier and for their raids on the English coast. Frenchmen who managed to swim ashore were clubbed to death by Flemish spectators. Only four English knights were killed, along with a larger number of other English combatants; chroniclers of the time estimated 400–600. The English joked that if the fish in Sluys harbour could speak, it would be in French, from the feast of French bodies they had dined on. For days the tides washed up bodies. Edward was wounded in the thigh by either an arrow or a bolt. Sumption summarises: "The French had suffered a naval catastrophe on a scale unequalled until modern times".