year in the Pacific. Strongly armed, and well provided with men and stores, she had sailed from Cronstadt soon after the declaration of war, and, eluding the English cruisers, had reached Japan and De Castries Bay. While negotiating a treaty with the Japanese government, Admiral Paniutin, as envoy from the czar, remained on board the Diana in Simoda harbour, island of Niphon. Here an earthquake caused the wreck of the ship, in November 1854. After a long detention, Paniutin bargained with an American trader to convey the crew of the Diana to Pétropaulovsk in three trips of the Caroline Foote. In April 1855, the captain and 150 men safely reached that fort; but finding that the Russians had just abandoned it, they followed them to the Amur. The American trader refused to have anything further to do in this delicate business; and Paniutin thereupon proceeded with great energy to build a vessel for himself; it was a small schooner-yacht, on which he employed his own carpenters and several Japanese. The yacht was intended to enable the admiral and a few officers and men to sail up the Amur en route to Irkoutsk and St Petersburg; and this intention was carried out. Meanwhile, 280 of the Diana's crew remained at Japan, longing for some mode of making their escape; but none such occurred until July, when the Greta, a small Bremen brig, undertook to convey them to Aian or the Amur. Just as this vessel was reaching its destination, the Barracouta descried it, and took all the Russians prisoners-thus giving a hapless climax to their shipwreck and detention on the Japanese coasts.

Little more need now be said. That the Russian flotilla had taken refuge at the Amur appeared probable enough; and some of the Allied ships, as we have just seen, were sent to watch in that quarter; but still the manoeuvres, as a whole, partook of a rambling and desultory charactera part of the fleet going south to Japan, and other parts to Sitka, to Vancouver, to San Francisco, and other ports in the North Pacific. Two French frigates, forming part of the Allied fleet, took possession of the island of Urup, the centre of Russian trade in the Kurile Archipelago, captured a trading-vessel laden with furs, and changed the name of the island temporarily to 'Alliance.'

The Allies never recovered the time lost in the early part of the season. The few vessels forming the Russian squadron succeeded, it is supposed, in reaching a part of the Amur where sandbanks and land-batteries prevented Elliot's squadron from following them; and so far as regarded a real capture or conquest of a shipof-war, no such event occurred. Much bitter commentary was made at home on these barren proceedings. It was said that 'a calm and philosophical leisure has distinguished our proceedings in all places and times, and under all circumstances;' that 'at home and abroad, in our offices and our dockyards, in the Baltic and in the Black Sea, under sun and frost, by sea,

by land, in the Tropics and under the Arctic Circle, it is always the same; when the occasion requires the utmost secrecy and dispatch, when half-a-dozen men at the most should know what is brewing, and when it is such a race between us and our nimble foe that twenty-four hours are all-important, we proclaim our dire intent, marshal a solemn procession, march across the earth or sea with drums beating and colours flying, and then-are too late.' Like most smart writing, this exaggerates the truth; but there is nevertheless truth at the bottom of it; for the war was characterised throughout by a want of promptness

the right operations being too frequently postponed to a wrong time. It is also worthy of note that, while Russian officers, naval and military, are to a large extent familiar with the English as well as the French languages, the British flects in the Pacific do not appear to have possessed one officer who could read or speak Russian.

Cruising over the North Pacific, Admirals Bruce and Stirling had much reason to regret that England possesses no naval station on the west coast of America, north of Vancouver. Many thoughtful men have urged that, as England possesses the American seaboard of the Pacific from lat. 49° to 56°, a road of 1300 miles would connect that coast with Lake Superior, whence there is water-communication through British America to the mouth of the St Lawrence, and onward nearly in a direct line to England. For want of some such station, the Pacific squadron is obliged to sail so far south as San Francisco or the Sandwich Islands to rendezvous, and is then in danger of losing its sailors by desertion in those tempting regions. It seems indeed singular, that at a time when the Russians held five naval stations in the Pacific-at Sitka, Pétropaulovsk, Okhotsk, Aian, and the mouth of the Amur— where their ships could be repaired or refitted by their own workmen, England had not one of similar character, but had to send her ships home, or to some distant port, for repair. It is probably not too much to assert, that if the broad belt of North America now under notice had belonged to the United States, instead of being under the stagnant control of the Colonial Office or the Hudson's Bay Company, the Pacific coast would teem with an active population, busily employed in convenient harbours, and developing the mineral and vegetable resources of the interior. Limiting attention, however, to the more immediate subject of the war, there can be little doubt that the Russian squadron might have been captured if Admiral Bruce had found facilities for wintering, or at least rendezvousing, in those latitudes.

The naval operations in the North, as this Chapter has shewn, were attended with as few successful results in 1855 as in 1854. The parallelism was borne out. True, Russia was prevented from sending her fleets into the open ocean, or to

HE fortune of war rendered necessary a second winter encampment of the Allied armies in the Crimea. Whatever may have been the paucity of great victories on their part, or the financial and material exhaustion on the part of the Russians; whatever the fluctuations between success and failure in the diplomatic attempts to arrive at a satisfactory peace-the approach of winter 1855-6 found the czar apparently as little willing as ever to acknowledge himself beaten, or to lessen the stubborn resistance offered to the attacks of the Allies. No officers fought better than those who led in his armies; no soldiers rushed upon death with more blind devotion, however little this devotion may have been accompanied by true military qualities, than those who served him; and these characteristics were displayed with full as much efficiency at the period now under notice as at any earlier date in the war. How the czar's dominions were becoming desolated, and his sources of wealth drained, the Western Powers were not fully to know until a later period.

THE ALLIES IN SEBASTOPOL.

When, on the morning of the 9th of September, the Allied commanders found that Prince Gortchakoff and the Russian garrison, together with nearly the whole of the inhabitants, had crossed from the south to the north side of Sebastopol Harbour, they saw that a decided line of policy was immediately necessary. It became their duty to ascertain whether any explosive mines had been purposely laid by the Russians; to occupy the town and the Karabelnaïa suburb with troops; to ward off pilferers and camp-followers; to guard against a Russian cannonading from the northern heights; to prepare an inventory of all the stores and other property captured; and to take measures, subject to orders from London and Paris, for the destruction of the docks and defence-works.

The appearance of the devoted city at the time

Chapter XI., p. 431.

when the conquerors entered it, and indeed long after, was fearfully wild. Destructive forces had been raging with a violence never before equalled perhaps in the history of sieges; and the whole internal area, from the Malakoff in the east to Fort Quarantine in the west, from Fort Nicholas in the north to the Flagstaff Battery in the south, was one vast disordered heap of crumbled earthworks, splintered and shattered masonry, ballpierced buildings and houses, torn-up streets and roads, scorched timbers, overturned cannon, broken muskets, balls and shells fired into the town by the besiegers, unused balls and shells intended to have been fired from the town by the defenders, gabions and sand-bags with which the earthworks had been hastily formed, and shattered vehicles. With unspeakable astonishment did the English and French officers thread their way through the barely discernible streets. In reference to the space more immediately contiguous to the siege-works, an eye-witness said: "The ground in parts is literally paved with shot sunk in the earth, above which their upper surface scarcely rises; there are ditches and trenches in which they lie as thick as apples in a basket; in some places numbers of them have been buried. You see them of every size, from the huge 68-pounder down to the diminutive grape-jolly little fellows, of a pleasant vinous appellation, but very nasty to run against as they are passing through the air. As to the fragments of shell, you might macadamise roads with them-jagged rusty bits of iron, infinitely various in size and form; one thinks, as one looks at them, how many a stout and gallant fellow received his quietus from some of them before they fell to the ground after their diverging upward flight. Then you come upon ill-treated cannon-trunnionless some, others with muzzles knocked off, some burst into two or three pieces, and others bearing indentations as from the hammer of a Cyclops. You walk up into the Redan-into the Malakoff, if the French sentries object not-and you marvel at the huge dimensions of those famous works, and feel more surprised at their having ever become ours than at their having so long resisted the utmost efforts of English and French-such a medley of enormous earthworks, huge lumps of stone, heaps upon heaps of shot, and broken shell, and damaged

guns, everything rugged and battered-a work of giants reduced to chaos. And then the gloomy, fetid bomb-proofs, where, for so long a time, the stubborn Russians lurked-wretched holes, worse than most dungeons.'

The town itself, although exhibiting a wreck of warlike appliances less wild than the lines of disrupted batteries, made perhaps a still greater impression on those who directed their steps among the deserted homes of the late inhabitants. The buildings were shattered into forms truly fantastic; some with the lower stories almost shot away, and barely able to support the superstructure; some with enormous gaps in the walls, or with roofs broken into a mere fringe-work. Proofs were manifold that the Russians intended to have defended the town street by street, had the besiegers forced an entrance; for across every principal street were constructed barricades of large stones, defended by pieces of artillery ; reasons of strategy induced Gortchakoff to change his plan, and to retreat to the north side of the harbour rather than maintain a street-fight, seeing that the Malakoff commanded the whole town. In the first burst of confusion following the capture, the French soldiers roamed through the streets, entered the riddled and deserted houses, and brought out bedsteads, tables, pictures, musical-instruments, wardrobes, and any property which their greed led them to hope might be regarded as spoil; and hence the streets presented a strange medley of cannon-balls, falling ruins, and household furniture; but these irregularities were checked as soon as General Bazaine became installed as military governor of the place. The Russians had attempted to destroy what they could not remove: this was only partially effected through insufficiency of time; but enough was done to mingle cinders and ashes with the other indications of ruin spread around.

In some

of the best houses columns were found broken by cannon-shot, ceilings fallen which those columns had once supported, elegant articles of furniture crushed beneath broken cornices and beams, and fragments of shattered looking-glass mingled with dust on the parquetry floors. Appearances shewed that most of the larger houses had been abandoned for a considerable time by the inhabitants, to be given up to the soldiery. Exteriorly, the white stone buildings which looked so smiling and cheerful from the besiegers' camp, were cold forbidding ruins when viewed closely, pierced from top to bottom with shot-holes. The effect of the 13-inch shells had been extraordinary. These dread missiles, of which so many thousands had been hurled into the town, weigh 200 pounds cach, and, falling from an altitude of a mile and a half, have a percussive force of nearly seventy tons; large gaps or empty spaces in rows or clusters of buildings told that shells had penetrated roofs or walls, descended to a depth below the foundation, and then scattered everything around to a distance far and wide.

Never, perhaps, was the occupation of a city obtained under more strange circumstances; for although the English and French were the victors, they could scarcely remain in the place they had conquered. The Russians, in possession of the heights and forts northward of the harbour, sent forth shot and shell at long range whenever opportunity of working mischief occurred. The Allies continued to encamp outside the town, sending into the interior only so many troops as would suffice to guard it, and cautiously seeking quarters for those troops among the ruins. The Russians were strongly posted, and held the northern heights as completely as the Allies held those on the south; the main body occupied the formidable Sievernaya or Star Fort, and the batteries and forts near the mouth of the harbour; another body covered the Valley of the Belbek, and was protected in front by field-works thrown up along the ridge of Inkermann; while Liprandi's army occupied the ground from the Mackenzie heights to the hills near Aïtodor. Whether Gortchakoff would effect a retreat into the interior, by abandoning altogether the position near Sebastopol; or whether, if he did not so, the Allies would be enabled to attack and conquer him—were questions left for the winter to solve; but the immediate necessity was for caution in guarding isolated portions of the Allied troops from the fire of the Russians stationed on the north.

To take an inventory of the captured stores being one of the earliest duties on the part of the Allies, an Anglo-French commission was formed for this purpose; seeing that a division of trophies and spoils between the two armies was one of the conditions in the treaty of alliance. The commission consisted of about twenty military, naval, and engineering officers generals, brigadiers majors, captains, lieutenants, commissaries, with one or two civilians; and its proceedings were very characteristic; for-dealing with missiles and implements of war-its deliberations were from time to time disturbed by a shot or a shell from the northern forts, ploughing into or near the very building in which the officers were sitting. More correctly, however, there was a head commission assisted by subordinate commissions; the former consisted of Sir George Dacres, Captain Drummond, Colonel Chapman, Mr Drake, General Niel, General Thiry, Admiral Regault de Genouilly, M. Paris, and M. Budin; and, under these nine commissioners, arrangements were made for exploring the city and forts by sub-commissions formed of the other twenty officers. One subcommission visited the western half of the city. with Forts Nicholas and Alexander, the Quarantine and Flagstaff Batteries, and the Central Bastion: while the other paid a similar exploratory visit to the Karabelnaïa suburb, with the Malakof, the two Redans, and the other defence-works on that side. This examination occupied about ten days during the latter part of September. It was found that the town contained the enormous

number of 3839 cannon, 128 brass and the rest iron; the commission proposed to present two of the finest brass guns to General della Marmora, as a memento of good-will towards the Sardinians, and to divide the remainder equally between the English and the French. Considered as a question of money-value, however, it was decided that the three nations should receive booty according to the number of men employed. This number, on the 8th of September, had been 126,705 French, and 63,715 Anglo-Sardinians. As to the poor Turks, they appear here, as on many other occasions during the war, to have been almost wholly forgotten, except by having presented to them two brass guns which had been Turkish field-pieces. The inventory included a vast quantity of matériel used in offensive and defensive warfare, in engineering, and in supplying the daily wants of a garrison.* Half a million shot and shell, nearly as many ball-cartridges, half a million pounds of gunpowder, and nearly four thousand cannon, shewed how enormous were the defensive resources of Gortchakoff at the time when he resolved on abandoning the city. A large quantity of black bread, unpalatable to English and French troops, but familiar to Slavonic and Asiatic races, was sent to feed the Tatar inhabitants of Eupatoria, who were only saved from utter starvation by supplies from the Allies. The few objects of fine art found, not injured by balls and bullets, were placed at the disposal of the commanders. In valuing the cannon they were taken by weight as mere metal-2f. 50c. per kilogramme for brass guns, and 10c. per kilogramme for iron (about 11d. per lb. and d. per lb. respectively). All articles in duplicate, and all of which the value could be correctly determined, were shared equally between the Allies. Large quantities of clothing, accidentally discovered in a store, were added in a supplementary list. As wood was especially valuable for fuel, the eastern half of the city was given up to the English, and the western to the French, in respect to the wood and other materials obtained by destroying houses and buildings; but many a shot was

Round-shot, 407,314; shell, 101,755; canister-cases, 24,080; gunpowder, 525,000 lbs.; ball-cartridges for muskets and carbines, 470,000 in good condition, and 160,000 damaged; wagons, 80 yawls, 6; logs of lignum vitæ, 500; anchors of port-moorings, 400; anchors of different sizes, 90; grapplings and small anchors, 50; chains for anchors, 200 yards; old copper for sheathing, 104,000 lbs. ; old ropes, 100,000 lbs. ; water-casks, 300; new ropes of different sizes, 50,000 lbs.; pulleys, 400; spars, 40; tools, 300; bar-iron and steel, 1,460,000 lbs. ; iron-wire, 400 lbs. ; iron-checks, 320 lbs. ; sheet-iron, 16,000 lbs.; tin-plate, 14,000 lbs.; red copper, 120,000 lbs.; nails, 6000 lbs.; fir-wood, a large quantity; pitch and tar, 200 barrels; barrels of paint, 150; small boilers, weighing 6000 lbs.; the remains of a steam-engine of 220 horse-power, taken out of a steamer burned by the Russians; large copper-boilers (weighing 100,000 lbs.), 8; old copper, 100,000 lbs. ; copper-screws, 10,000 lbs.; old iron, 160,000 lbs. ; large bells, 6; small bells, 10; hospital-beds, 350; iron forges, in great numbers; main-tackles, 12; coal, 2000 tons; steam-engines, of 30 horse-power, for the basins, 2; large pumps for the basins, 3; iron boilers, 3; 1 high-pressure engine of 16 horse-power, for the basins; iron cranes, 17; an engine of 12 horse-power in the military bakery; 2 dredgingmachines of 30 horse-power, unserviceable; a still, a clock, six marble statues, two sphinxes, a large basso-rilievo; biscuit, 500 tons; flour, 150; barley, 9; buckwheat, 117; oats, 18; millet, 54; wheat, 20; peasc, 1; salt-meat, 60; wheat in the granaries, 500 quarters, &c.

received from the northern batteries during this process of demolition.

Lamentable as such destruction would have been under circumstances less stringent than those of stern war, it was destined to be carried still further by the blowing up of the splendid docks on which the Czar Nicholas had expended such immense sums. This was an imperative duty; since the power of Russia to maintain a threatening attitude over Turkey had been based in considerable degree on the facilities afforded by Sebastopol for building, repairing, and harbouring ships-of-war. The forts and the docks became equally objects of attention on the part of the Allies. It was found that Gortchakoff, in evacuating the south side, had not had time to destroy so many of the forts as he had intended. Fort Paul was blown to atoms; Fort Alexander was very much damaged; but Forts Quarantine and Nicholas had been little injured. As for the fleet, it was gone; more than fifty vessels-of-war, including eighteen sail-of-the-line, lay sunken at the bottom of the splendid harbour, with their mast-heads jutting above the water-a memento of the extraordinary tactics adopted by the Russians.

To destroy the docks was a work of immense difficulty, so strongly and perfectly had they been constructed. This fine specimen of hydraulic engineering-comprising three inner docks, a basin, two outer docks, and a lock, with the steammachinery for filling them with water-had been left uninjured by the Russians. Many English officers present were impressed with the appearance of these docks as surpassing any before seen, bespeaking the skill and energy of the Englishman who had constructed them, and the lavish expenditure of the autocrat under whose orders they had been constructed. It has already been noticed that Mr Upton went to Russia as a kind of engineering adventurer, and succeeded in gaining the confidence of Nicholas. One authority states that the original plan for the Sebastopol docks was drawn up by a French engineer, M. Riancourt; that his estimate of 6,000,000 roubles startled the authorities; that Upton thereupon undertook the arduous enterprise; that he promised to complete it in five years, at a cost of 2,500,000 roubles; but that the ultimate cost in time was doubled, and in money quadrupled. He began his labours in June 1832, and is said to have employed at one time a whole army of military labourers, 30,000 in number; who suffered dreadfully from exposure to burning sun, glaring white rocks, and clouds of fine dust. The principal basin, 400 feet by 300, was 30 feet above the level of the sea; and as there were no tides to fill it, a necessity arose for constructing an aqueduct to bring water from the Tchernaya river, from a point far above the Inkermann Valley. Even this supply being inadequate in hot weather, a pumping-engine was obtained from

Chapter VII, p. 232.