I would rather have died with hunger. I was nearly choked all the day drinking water to take the dreadful taste out of my mouth. Some time afterwards, however, I was as keen as any one looking after the same animals; necessity compelled me to do so. The cavalry had two or three horses that died with sheer hunger, as there was no forage to give them. The poor animals used to tremble at the water trough. I made a remark that if the enemy had known how we were situated they could very easily have taken the town from us. The inhabitants of the town were also starving. I have actually seen the cavalry scrape the meat off the dead horses’ bones. The cholera broke out (1832), and the inhabitants began to die off very fast. If the enemy had come against us with a reinforcement, they could have killed and destroyed us all; but it was fortunate for us poor soldiers that they did not know how we were situated. They lived first-rate themselves, but would allow nothing to reach us. We often used to make a sally to beat them back in order to get something to eat, if possible. We used sometimes to get rations served out that were conveyed by the fleet whenever they had an opportunity of working the boats. There was a 15-gun battery on the north side of the town, just at the entrance to the bar, coming into the river Douro. Our people formed a bridge of pontoons, and our army went over (about 6000) to beat back the enemy and rescue the battery. It was not very difficult to come at, and we took possession of the battery, and the guns were spiked and thrown off the carriages. We beat the enemy about two leagues to the rear, and marched back again into the town. We cut down the body of a soldier from off a tree on the breast of the town, which had been hanging there seven weeks, and buried him. As we often went down the river at low water mark, we supposed the enemy had got hold of the poor man. We now had an excellent allowance served out by the admiral’s squadron, consisting of beef and biscuit, sometimes pork. Before we captured the battery, when conveying the boats in, they used to muffle the oars to prevent any noise being made by them, so as to do everything as secretly as possible; for they would have swamped us if they had heard any noise. We had very hard times of it.