The circumstance of so few boats hitting the mole with the rear-admiral, who had appointed it as the general place of landing, after having been baffled in his first design, proved fatal to the enterprise. By landing in the surf, they lost their scaling implements; and Captain Troubridge was not prepared instantly to storm the citadel, before the approach of the Spanish troops, which could only have been carried by a sudden _coup de main_. Rear-Admiral Nelson had only one foot out of the boat, and was in the act of landing on the mole, under a most tremendous fire from the batteries, when his arm was shot nearly off; and he fell back in the boat. At that awful moment, he recollected the injunction of his deceased uncle, on receiving the sword which he had thus been compelled to drop; and, groping at the bottom, speedily recovered it, and firmly grasped it in his remaining hand. He called to his brave companions in arms, who had already landed to storm the mole, and directed them to force the gate of the citadel; a task which, with all their exertion, they found it impossible to accomplish, though they succeeded in spiking several of the guns. At this juncture, Lieutenant Nesbit very humanely took the handkerchief from his neck, and tied it round the shattered arm of his father-in-law, a little above where it had been shot. The boat, in the mean time, was hastening to return on board the Theseus, amidst a most dreadful discharge from the batteries. It soon approached where the Fox cutter had just been sunk by a shot under water; and the unhappy men with which it had been charged, consisting of one hundred and eighty persons, were in the act of struggling for their lives. This was a scene of distress too dreadful to be passed, by their humane commander, without at least endeavouring to lessen the extent of the calamity. As many as possible of these poor fellows were instantly taken into the boat; an office of humanity in which the rear-admiral himself eagerly assisted, with his sole arm, smarting as he then was under the agony occasioned by the recent separation of the other. The corporeal anguish which he now felt, however, was mitigated by the solace he received in thus rescuing a few of his brave fellows from impending destruction; but, alas! the mental horror which he suffered, at beholding some of the noblest of the human race compelled to be forcibly rejected, and abandoned to their wretched fate, through dread of sinking his own overcharged boat, admitted of no alleviation, and inflicted pangs on his heroic heart, to describe which the powers of language are incapable of yielding any adequate expression. Every possible exertion was used to reach the Theseus, with a faint hope of the boat's returning in time to save a few more of these unhappy victims; and, a chair being called for, to accommodate the rear-admiral in getting on board, so impatient was he for the boat's return, that he desired to have only a single rope thrown