Here was a warning for all time as to the conduct of expeditions to the West Indies. Care must be taken for good understanding between army and navy; and the fleet must sail from England at latest in October. We shall see how far this warning has been observed. The next important expedition to the West Indies was sent by King William in 1695 to root out the French who had established themselves at the western end of St Domingo, now called Haiti, and who were threatening Jamaica from thence. This armament did not sail till January, three months too late, and consequently did not begin operations till May. In four months over a thousand out of the thirteen hundred soldiers had died; while the quarrels between the naval and military commanders banished all hope of solid success. The next great tropical expedition undertaken was that of 1740-1 against Carthagena on the Spanish main, but little outside the beat of our West Indian squadrons. The enterprise was prompted by sheer greed of gain; the troops were young and raw recruits (for of course we had no old soldiers) and numbered six thousand; American levies to the number of four thousand were sent from Jamaica to join them; the whole were shamefully ill-equipped; and finally the armament sailed four months too late. It was exactly the story of St Domingo over again. The military commander died on the voyage, and his successor, a feeble creature, was treated with the greatest contempt by the naval officers. However, the force reached Carthagena, and the troops were landed; but the General, mistrusting himself and his men, was so slow and dilatory in his movements that he delayed the decisive attack until late in April, and was then repulsed. Sickness, lead and steel had already reduced his force from nine thousand to little over six thousand effectives, and on the night of the defeat the yellow fever fell upon the unhappy army in earnest. In three days--think of this appalling visitation--in three days the effective men had sunk from sixty-six hundred to thirty-two hundred; and in ten days more only a thousand were fit to be landed against an enemy. Reduced to a mere shadow, the expedition returned to Jamaica, but the yellow fever went with it; and, within twelve months of the arrival of the original armament in the tropics, its numbers had shrunk from nine thousand to fewer than three hundred fit for duty. At the beginning of 1742 these were joined by a reinforcement of three thousand men. Within a month a thousand of these were sick or dead. A thousand more died before October, and at last the force practically disappeared. Of the four thousand Americans only three hundred lived to return home; of the nine thousand British a bare one in ten survived. This on the whole is the most terrible story that I know in British military history; but perhaps I am led to think so by Smollett's vivid picture of its horrors in _Roderick Random_. I remember that I read that book for the first time when