Passages, the only port near the scene of operations suited for the supply of the army, being between the covering and besieging forces, the stores and guns once landed were in danger from every movement of the enemy; and no permanent magazines could therefore be established nearer than Bilbao, at which port and at St. Ander and Coruña the great depôts of the army were fixed; the stores being transported to them from the establishments in Portugal. But the French held Santoña, whence their privateers interrupted the communication along the coast of Spain; American privateers did the same between Lisbon and Coruña; and the intercourse between Sebastian and the ports of France was scarcely molested by the English vessels of war: because Wellington’s urgent remonstrances could not procure a sufficient naval force on the coast of Biscay! SIEGE OF SAN SEBASTIAN. (June, 1813.) Built on a low sandy isthmus, having the harbour on one side, the river Urumea on the other, Sebastian was strong; and behind it rose the Monte Orgullo, a rugged cone four hundred feet high, washed by the ocean and crowned with the small castle of La Mota. This hill was cut off from the town by a line of defensive works, and covered with batteries; but was itself commanded at a distance of thirteen hundred yards by the Monte Olia, on the other side of the Urumea. The land front of the town, three hundred and fifty yards wide, stretching quite across the isthmus, consisted of a high curtain or rampart, very solid, with half bastions at either end and a lofty casemated flat bastion or cavalier in the centre. A regular horn-work was pushed out from this front, and six hundred yards beyond the horn-work the isthmus was closed by the ridge of San Bartolomeo, at the foot of which stood the suburb of San Martin. On the opposite side of the Urumea were certain sandy hills called the _Chofres_, through which the road from Passages passed to a wooden bridge over the river, and thence, by a suburb called Santa Catalina, along the top of a sea-wall which formed a _fausse-braye_ for the horn-work.