“ ... These arrangements were made on the 17th before dinner. Without notice to any person concerned the Neapolitan officers packed up their baggage, and crowded the streets and quays with their preparations for departing on the evening of the 17th. Their baggage was actually sent on board, their general actually embarked that evening, and the troops, quitting every post where they were stationed, continued their embarcation publicly from the quays of the town, from the evening of the 17th to the middle of the next day. Their eagerness, impatience and panic were so great on the 18th, in the forenoon, that the embarcation of the inhabitants was rendered not only difficult but dangerous, the Neapolitan soldiers firing on those boats which they could not get admission to. Many of themselves were drowned in attempting to crowd into the boats, and there was a temporary appearance of confusion and insurrection in the town. The Neapolitan Admiral seems to have been in as great haste as the military. He sailed long before either the British or Spanish squadrons and, without waiting to make any arrangement about either troops or refugees, pushed off for Naples, leaving a good number of Neapolitan troops on board our fleet to find their way home as well as they can.”[88] Until nearly all the allied troops were embarked the British and Piedmontese remained resolutely at their posts, which they did not quit until recalled into the town to cover the operations of the sailors, who were burning the arsenal and setting fire to the French ships. When the outposts were withdrawn the French crowded into Toulon, and by the light of the flames shot heavily at the blue-jackets, busy at the work of devastation, in which they were helped by a party of the XVIIIth, commanded by Ensign W. Iremonger, one of the two land officers employed on this dangerous duty. For a time a musketry fight raged; then at the appointed hour the soldiers gradually withdrew to their boats, gained their ships, and in two or three hours the whole of the allied fleet was safely out to sea. Though Hood’s operations on land utterly failed to advance the cause of the Royalists, and though he did not succeed in destroying the arsenal completely, or in burning all the enemy’s ships, he undoubtedly inflicted a serious, though not a crushing blow to the naval power of France in the Mediterranean by his operations at Toulon. When he took possession of the town he found floating in its harbour or building in its dockyard fifty-eight men-of-war of various sizes: thirty-three he annexed or burned to the water’s edge, the remaining twenty-five he was obliged to leave behind him, to become the nucleus of a new fleet. The price paid in human flesh and blood for this success cannot be stated, for the losses of the Allies are not to be traced, and the British returns, as far as they were published in despatches, are incomplete, and in the case