The Channel is tunnelled (in imagination), troops pour through with ammunition, cannon, and other paraphernalia of war. Above, a fleet of vessels on the sea, and an army of balloons in the air, invade the devoted island, which defends itself by means of captive kites, sky rockets, and the guns booming from the fortifications at Dover. This in several versions.[149] The crowning of Napoleon as King of Italy at Milan, on May 23, 1805, is recorded, as also the Peace of Tilsit, 1807, by which Prussia was stripped of almost half of its territory. On this latter fan, Napoleon, the Emperor Alexander, and the King of Prussia appear on a raft. In 1810 the Emperor, in all the bravery of feathers, leads the Archduchess Marie-Louise to the altar of Hymen; La France offering a diadem of stars. Of fans referring to the Russian campaign of 1812 two appear in the Schreiber collection. In the one, Napoleon is seen on horseback, attended by a general, surveying his army, the troops saluting; in the other, the journey to Paris in a sledge drawn by three horses at full gallop, Napoleon, wrapped up in furs, looking back on the wounded and dead lying in the snow. Both fans inscribed, ‘Aventuras de Bonaparte en Rusia en 1812.’ In the subject of the Nicaragua Canal the fan assumes the role of prophet, and with this we must bring to a close this brief carnival of a century. On the 12 Vendémiaire of the year XII., one Martin la Bastide deposited in the Bibliothèque Nationale two prints of a fan setting forth his scheme for uniting two oceans through the lake of Nicaragua. He had already made the suggestion twelve years previously in Laborde’s _Histoire abrégée de la mer du Sud_. He was not, however, the first to demonstrate the feasibility of cutting a canal at Nicaragua; a similar proposal had been made by the Portuguese navigator, Antonio Galvão, as early as 1550, and in the following year the Spanish historian, Gómara, submitted a memorial to Philip II., urging in forcible terms that the work be undertaken forthwith. ‘The project was, nevertheless, opposed by the Spanish Government, who concluded that a monopoly of communication with their possessions in the New World was of greater importance than a passage by sea to Cathay.’[150]