Napoleon Bonaparte had crushed all opposition in Central and Southern Europe, but there was one Power which foiled him--Great Britain. The French Government compelled Spain and Holland to join in a naval war against England, but Jervis and Nelson broke and scattered the combined fleets. Bonaparte had conceived a bitter hatred against the only Power which now defied the might of France, and was causing him “to miss his destiny.” “I will conquer Egypt and India; then, attacking Turkey, I will take Europe in the rear.” So he wrote. In the spring of 1798 he set out for Egypt, reducing Malta on the way, and just eluding Nelson’s fleet. He had got as far as Cairo when he heard of Nelson’s victory in Aboukir Bay, where his French fleet was destroyed. But Bonaparte, undaunted, pressed on to attack Syria. He stormed Jaffa, and put the garrison to the sword. Not content with this cruelty, he marched the townsfolk, to the number of 3,700, into the middle of a vast square, formed by the French troops. The poor wretches shed no tears, uttered no cries. Some who were wounded and could not march so fast as the rest were bayonetted on the way. The others were halted near a pool of dirty, stagnant water, divided into small bodies, marched in different directions, and there shot down. When the French soldiers had exhausted their cartridges, the sword and bayonet finished the business. Sir Sidney Smith, a Captain commanding a few ships in the Levant, hearing of these atrocities, hurried with his ships to St. Jean d’Acre, which lies north of Jaffa, on the north end of the bay which is protected on the south by the chalk headland of Carmel, jutting out like our Beachy Head far into the sea. Sir Sidney arrived in the _Tigre_ at Acre only two days before Bonaparte appeared. On the 17th of March he sent the _Tigre’s_ boats by night to the foot of Mount Carmel, and there they found the French advanced guard encamped close to the water’s edge. The boats opened with grape, and the French retired in a hurry up the side of the mount. The main body of the army, hearing that the sea-road was exposed to gun-fire from British ships, went round by Nazareth and invested Acre to the east. A French corvette and nine sail of gun vessels coming round Mount Carmel, found themselves close to the English fleet, and seven of them were made prizes, manned from the ships, and employed to harass the enemy’s posts.