Soult had long resolved to reduce the maritime town of Tarifa, but General Campbell, governor of Gibraltar, equally resolute to prevent him, threw in an English garrison, under Colonel Skerrett. The defences were ancient, the place being encircled with towers connected by an archery wall, irregular, without a ditch, and too thin to resist even field artillery. It was commanded also by heights within cannon-shot, but the English engineer Smith[21] adapted the defence to the peculiarities of ground so skilfully as to fix the enemy’s attention entirely to one point, which offered facilities for an internal resistance, to begin when the weak ramparts should be broken. Tarifa was cloven by a periodical torrent, entering at the east and passing out at the west. It was barred at the entrance by a tower with a portcullis, in front of which palisades were planted across its bed. The houses within the walls were strongly built on inclined planes, rising from each side of the torrent; and at the exit of the water were two massive structures, called the tower and castle of the Gusmans, both looking up the hollow formed by the inclined planes. From these structures, a sandy neck, prolonged by a causeway for eight hundred yards, joined the town to an island, whose perpendicular sides forbade entrance save by the causeway which ended on an unfinished entrenchment and battery. On the neck of land were sand hills, the highest, called the Catalina, being scarped and crowned with a field-work holding a twelve-pounder. This hill masked the causeway towards the enemy, and with the tower of the Gusmans, which was armed with a ship eighteen-pounder, flanked the western front of the tower. This tower gun also shot clear over Tarifa to the slope where the French batteries were expected, and there were a ship of the line, a frigate, and some gun-boats, anchored to flank the approaches. Smith deterred the enemy from attacking the western front by the flanking fire of a fortified convent beyond the walls, by the Catalina hill, and by the appearance of the shipping; but he deceitfully tempted an attack on the eastern front and the line of the torrent, whose bed rendered the inner depth of wall greater than the outer. There he loopholed the houses behind, opened communications to the rear, and barricaded the streets; so that the enemy, after forcing the breach, would have been confined between the houses on the inclined planes, exposed on each side to musketry from loopholes and windows, and in front to a fire from the Gusmans, which looked up the bed of the torrent; finally the garrison could have taken refuge in that castle and tower, which, high and massive, were fitted to cover the evacuation, and were provided with ladders for the troops to descend and retreat to the island under protection of the Catalina.