shared with Lord Amherst and the army, and no captain of a ship had any opportunity of separate distinction.

But the time had come when Rodney was to have an opportunity of displaying his talents in a wider sphere of action. In May, 1759, he received his flag, and was immediately appointed to the command of one of the squadrons with which Pitt began to harass the French coast. Next to the blockade of Brest, which Hawke watched with a large fleet, the most important of the enterprises which the Minister had planned was an attack upon Havre; because he had learnt that in that port a vast number of transports-flat-bottomed boats, with a quantity of military stores of all kinds--had been prepared to assist in an invasion of England. And this was entrusted to Rodney, who hoisted his flag in the Achilles of sixty guns, having under him also four fiftygun ships, five frigates, and a sloop, besides a few mortarboats. On the 3rd of July he anchored in the roads of Havre, where the commander had long been forewarned of the attack that was intended, and where, therefore, ample preparations had been made to resist it. Powerful batteries had been erected all along the shore, and on both sides of the river's mouth; and they were garrisoned with several thousand men, who opened a heavy fire on the squadron the moment it came within gunshot. But they could not even delay Rodney's operations for an instant. The pilots with whom he had been furnished proved wholly ignorant of the place; but some of the captains (one of whom, Captain Samuel

Hood, of the Pestal frigate, afterwards rose to the very highest eminence) showed great skill and energy in taking soundings. They worked all night. By the morning of the 4th every ship and bomb-vessel was in its appointed station; and they commenced a bombardment which was continued without intermission for two days and two nights. No such operation had ever succeeded more completely. Nearly all the transports and boats were burnt, with all the warehouses containing the stores, and the town itself was repeatedly set on fire. A few days afterwards some of the flat-bottomed boats which had remained untouched by the bombardment tried to escape along the shore; but Rodney's vigilance was equal to his other qualifications for command, and he pursued and drove them all ashore at Port Bassin, where he compelled the French commandant himself to burn them as the only condition on which he would spare the town itself, which it was in his power utterly to destroy. He took the opportunity, too, to teach M. de Brassac a lesson on good faith. That officer had sent him two officers conveying his promise to burn the boats; but when, in reliance on that undertaking, Rodney had suspended his fire, M. de Brassac refused to fulfil it, on the plea that his commander-inchief, the Duc d'Harcourt, refused to ratify the arrangement. Indignant at such treachery, Rodney arrested and detained some other officers, whom De Brassac had sent with an explanation of his conduct, and would not release them till the boats were actually destroyed.

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then returned to England, having so completely disabled Havre that it has never recovered its former importance as an arsenal for men-of-war. And he lived to see the day when it was of no small importance to us that a place possessed of such natural advantages, and so directly opposite our own principal arsenal, was no longer in a condition to protect a hostile fleet.

The rest of that year he cruised up and down the French coast, keeping it in constant terror, so that scarcely a vessel of any size could venture to leave its harbour. And so great was the reputation which he had now established that in the autumn of 1761 he was given the command of a magnificent fleet of eighteen sail of the line, and fourteen frigates, with several smaller vessels, and despatched to the West Indies to attack the French settlements in that quarter. A powerful land force under General Moncton was appointed to cooperate with him, and the reduction of the fertile island of Martinique was pointed out to him by his instructions as his first object. Martinique was the most flourishing of all the French possessions in that region; it was the chief seat of their West Indian Government, as of their commerce, and it possessed the finest harbour in those seas. We had failed in an attempt on it two years before; but the enemy had taken even our failure as a warning, and had employed the interval in strengthening their fortifications and augmenting their garrison. It was the first week of 1762 when Rodney reached the island; but so little care had been taken to supply either

him or the general with information concerning the strength of the place, or even the natural character of the island, that some little time was lost in deciding on the proper points at which to commence our operations. But Rodney's force was sufficient to enable him to threaten and assail several points at the same time, and accordingly, while he sent in Captain Hervey in the Dragon to silence some batteries in one quarter, and Commodore Swanton in the Vanguard against some others, he himself, in his flagship the Marlborough, with the rest of his fleet, destroyed the fortifications in St. Anne's Bay. But he had yet to discover the true point of attack. Port Royal was the strongest place in the island; and on the 16th of January the troops were landed on the western side of the bay of the same name, at a distance of about four miles from the town, and Moncton at once began to assault two strongly-fortified heights called Mont Garnier and Mont Tortenson, which were among the most important defences of the town. An equally formidable outwork was a steep rock a short distance from the shore, called Pigeon Island, which was surmounted by a castle armed with artillery of the largest calibre. The rock was too high for our guns to reach it; but Rodney opened his fire upon it rather to distract the governor's attention, and so to embarrass his exertions for the defence of the forts on land, than with the expectation of doing much injury to Pigeon Island. And presently he adopted a new expedient, which has often been employed since his time-by Nelson in Corsica, by

Sir E. Lyons in the Crimea, and by Captain Peel in India. As the greater part of the ships were without employment, he drafted from the crews a thousand bluejackets, and sent them on shore to aid the soldiers in the construction of their batteries. The energy of the sailors in this novel employment astonished the whole army; and a light infantry officer in one of his letters drew a lively picture of them, "working harder than all the dray horses in London, dragging cannon and mortars, carriages and all up the heights, without any regard to the steepness of the rocks, or the weight of the burthen, huzzahing and holloaing, sometimes uphill, and sometimes downhill, sometimes tumbling over the stones, sometimes sticking in the mire, far from choice in their language, not particular as to the object of the imprecations which they lavished around them, but equally regardless of danger or death, and resolved to do their work without delay, and in despite of whatever obstacles Spaniard, Pope, or Pretender, or even worse, might raise to thwart them."

Against an army and fleet working together in such a spirit, all resistance was vain. The sailors, not content with aiding to erect the batteries, joined in manning them. Fort after fort yielded to the heavy fire, and on one or two occasions to the gallantry with which they repelled sallies of the garrison. The capture of the forts rendered Port Royal untenable, and on the 3rd of February, within three weeks of the first landing of the troops, it surrendered. The moment it was in