On the fourth the siege works were pushed forward to within 200 yards of the walls of the citadel, and the breach already established in the dilapidated bastion was enlarged to a great breadth. After dark the French engineers got forward as far as the counterscarp, and reported that an assault was practicable, and could hardly fail. The same fact was perfectly evident to O’Daly, who sent out a _parlementaire_ to ask for terms. He offered to surrender in return for leave to take his garrison off by sea. Reille naturally refused, as the Spaniards were at his mercy, and enforced an unconditional surrender. The state of things being visible to Lord Cochrane on the next morning, he hastily evacuated the Trinity fort, which it was useless to hold after the citadel had fallen. His garrison, 100 Spaniards and eighty British sailors and marines, had to descend from the fort by rope ladders, as the enemy commanded the proper point of embarkation. They were taken off by the boats of the _Fame_ and _Impérieuse_ under a heavy musketry fire, but suffered no appreciable loss. The magazine was left with a slow match burning, and exploded, ruining the fort, before the garrison had got on board their ships. St. Cyr, in his journal of the war in Catalonia, suggests that Bennett and Cochrane ought to have tried to take off the garrison of the citadel in the same fashion. But this was practically impossible: the communication between the citadel and the sea had been lost for some days, the French batteries along the beach rendering the approach of boats too dangerous to be attempted. If Captain Bennett had sent in the limited supply of boats that the _Fame_, the _Impérieuse_ and the two smaller vessels[60] possessed they would probably have been destroyed. For they would have had to make many return journeys in order to remove 2,500 men, under the fire of heavy guns placed only 200 or 300 yards away from the landing-place. It was quite another thing to remove 180 men from the Trinity, where the enemy could bring practically nothing but musketry to bear, and where the whole of the garrison could be taken off at a single trip. Another futile charge made by the French against the British navy, is that the _Fame_ shelled the beach near the citadel while the captive garrison was marching out, and killed several of the unfortunate Spaniards. If the incident happened at all (there is no mention of it in Lord Cochrane or in James) it must have been due to an attempt to damage the French trenches; Captain Bennett could not have known that the passing column consisted of Spaniards. To insinuate that the mistake was deliberate, as does Belmas, is simply malicious[61]. [60] These were the two bomb-vessels _Meteor_ and _Lucifer_. The _Magnificent_ 74 came up the same day, but after the evacuation of the Trinity.