During his absence, however, certain changes took place in the conduct of the siege. The other leaders, tired, perhaps, and a little ashamed of all this juggling with treaties that they never meant to abide by, and of this haggling over prices with their enemies, or else knowing that if Kolocotrones was there he would take the lion's share of the spoils, made a spirited though ineffectual attempt, since Ali had broken off negotiations, to bring the siege to a conclusion in his absence. During the spring many volunteers from England and France had offered their services to the revolutionists; there had even been formed a corps of Philhellenes, and several of these, notably Colonel Jourdain, a French artilleryman, and two Englishmen, Hastings and Hane, had put themselves at the disposal of the Greek troops in Nauplia. Jourdain, an ingenious but impractical young man, had urged the Greeks to try firing combustible shot at the town. He held out good hope that they would set the town on fire--with luck they might even demolish the enemy's powder-magazine and burn their provision houses, full of the provisions which had just been sold to them. And the captains, jingling with the gold of the payment, found this plan humorous. The fort standing on the island in the bay had been put into the hands of the Greeks at the first pseudo-surrender of the town, and though Ali declared that the treaty which gave it them being null and void, as they had not done their part in providing transport-vessels, it should be returned to the Turks, the answer that the Greeks gave was, "Come and take it." And as the Turks were not in a position to come and take it, it was obviously misplaced Quixotism to let it stand empty. From there the ingenious Jourdain suggested that the combustible shot should be fired, but his ingenuity further served him to relieve himself of the responsibility of the attempt, and Hastings and Hane, though without much faith in the method, obtained leave of the Greek captains to do it themselves. Accordingly, Hastings was made captain of the fort garrison, which consisted of twenty boatmen from Kranidi, who knew about as much of artillery as of astronomy, and he surveyed his men with some amusement, and spoke pithily: "We are to make Nauplia as full of holes as a net and as hot as hell," he said. "Train the guns, if you know what that means. You do not? I will teach you." There were half a dozen 32-pounders and three 68-pounders of seven-inch bore. The fort was an old Venetian work, tottery and unstable as Reuben, commanded by the guns of Nauplia; and Hastings, surveying it, turned to Hane. "From the town I could engage to knock this place into biscuits in ten minutes by a stop-watch," he said. Hane laughed. "We shall knock it to bits ourselves in not much longer with the concussion of our own guns if the Turks don't hit us," he said. "I would as soon sail across the Bay of Biscay in a paper boat."