Looking on these remains, I tried to put myself in the place of our forefathers beleaguering this fortress, when, for the first time, they saw, heard, and felt this terrestrial lightning. It was not Neptune with his trident upturning the walls, but Jupiter with his bolts defending them. Algeciras, Troy-like, is memorable by its destruction. The Princes of Christendom and of Islam assembled from far and near to its siege. During this operation, the Spaniards so suffered from Gibraltar, then in the hands of the Moors, that Alonzo the Great, during whose minority it had been lost, vowed that he would retake it. After great and vain efforts, he ended his days in the camp before it. To raise money for the siege, excises were first invented. The French word _Gabelle_, and _Gabella_ the Italian, come from the Spanish _Al Cabala_, which is from the Arabic.[37] This Bay is thus remarkable as the birthplace of two inventions, which have changed in modern times the features of war and the characters of peace. The other to which I refer is at Cressy, two centuries before that.[38] The Chinese, in the beginning of the thirteenth century, used not merely gunpowder, but bombs, against the Moguls. Nothing can be more clear than the description of the latter in the Turkish writers quoted by D’Ohsson in his history of the Mogul conquests. From China and the Tartars, the discovery might have passed, as paper did, to the Arabs. The link was established between Pekin and the Amoor, the Amoor and the Oxus, the Oxus and Bagdad, Bagdad and Cordova. But indisputably the Saracens were working their way towards the discovery--the granulation of that composition, which was all that Friar Bacon, the pupil of the Moors, wanted to convert his crackers and squibs into cartridges.[39] It is but natural that they should have possessed gunpowder before we did, for they anticipated us in guns. Artillery, at its very origin, attained in their hands perfection. Discoveries and practice only conduct us back to the kinds of ordnance at which they arrived _per saltum_ and at once. Murat II. at the siege of Leodra, cast guns which carried ball of fourteen hundred weight. Such Titanic engines may still be seen at the Dardanelles, and Baron de Tott consulted respecting their use. At the battle of Chesme, in 1790, the Russian Admiral fell aboard the Turkish Admiral and drove in his guns. While the vessels were thus foul and grappling, the Turk discharged _one shot_ from inboard; it broke through the Russian on the opposite side. She immediately filled and sank, but locked in her deadly grasp, her antagonist sank with her. They now lie side by side “full fathom five.” At that time, the armament of our heaviest vessels consisted of twenty-four pounders, and of course a “First Lord” would have scoffed at the idea of a sixty-eight or eighty-four pounder afloat.