Legends -- Pyrenees; Pyrenees -- Description and travel; Pyrenees -- History
seemed paralyzed with astonishment, and a few quickly following
discharges of the ground-rockets drove them back in haste and
fear. More men were crossed over in the night at slack water;
and on the following evening the first division, two guns, and
a squadron of dragoons, were established on the right bank.”[C]
[C] Sherer, _Military Memoirs of the Duke of Wellington_.
London, 1832.
The flotilla appeared off the Adour on the morning of the 25th, the
bar was successfully passed, thirty-four _chasse-marées_ were brought
into position, and anchored head and stern upon the line selected;
the sappers worked all night, and by noon next day a solid bridge was
laid down. Troops and artillery now filed over it, and the citadel of
Bayonne was invested.
Upon the morning of 14 April the governor of the citadel made a furious
sortie upon the investing corps, which was wholly unprepared for the
attack, as peace had been declared, and Bonaparte had abdicated on 5
April. The news had reached Bayonne; the commandant of the citadel
was well aware of it, but could not resist the treacherous attempt to
retrieve his laurels by catching the British unprepared.
His assault was repulsed, with the loss of 830 men to the British, and
with the capture of Sir John Hope, who was wounded. The French attack
was supported by the fire of the gunboats on the river, which opened
indiscriminately on friend and foe. The French lost 910 men.
The cemetery where our gallant fellow-countrymen lie who thus fell
is on the edge of the Landes, on the north side of the Adour. When
Queen Victoria visited Biarritz, as also recently when King Edward VII
was there, this cemetery was duly visited by both monarchs. No one
who remains any length of time in Bayonne should omit a visit to the
beautiful lakes that lie embosomed in cork woods and pine forests in
the Landes, in the abandoned course of the Adour. The river, instead
of entering the sea where it does now, formerly turned north, and had
its mouth at Cape Breton, something like ten miles distant. But at the
close of the fourteenth century a violent tempest blowing from the west
threw up a barrier of sand and blocked the mouth of the Adour, which
then pursued its course northward, and finally discharged its waters
into the Atlantic at Vieux-Boucau, and that remained its mouth for two
centuries. But in 1579 the inhabitants of Bayonne, aided by a flood,
managed to pierce the isthmus of sand-hills which separated their town
from the sea, and thus created a new mouth for the river. The Adour,
however, pours into the bay in a contrary direction to the prevailing
winds, consequently there is an incessant struggle going on there
between the current and the waves, resulting in a deposit of mud, sand,
and pebble, and the building up of a bar which the sea is incessantly
driving towards the shore, whereas the river is as incessantly engaged
in repelling it. The existence of this bar makes the entrance to the
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