with twelve ships of the line. The Plaza was commanded, in the absence of the Captain-General, by the Corregidor, D. Antonio de Ayala, who assembled all the nobles in the castle's lower rooms and swore them to loyalty. The English attempted to disembark, and were beaten back; whereupon, as under Nelson, they sent a parliamentary and summoned the island to surrender to the Archduke Charles of Austria. The envoy informed the Governor, who is described by Dampier as sitting in a low, dark, uncarpeted room, adorned only with muskets and pikes, that Philip V. had lost Gibraltar, that Cadiz and Minorca had nearly fallen, and that the American galleons in the port of Vigo had been burnt or captured by the English, whose army, entering Castile, had overrun Aragon, Catalonia, and Valencia. The brave reply was, 'If Philip, our king, had lost his all in the Peninsula, these islands would still remain faithful to him.' And the castle guns did such damage that the Jennings squadron sailed away on the same evening. The third expedition, detached by Admiral Sir John Jervis, afterwards Earl St. Vincent, to 'cut out a richly freighted Manilla ship,' also resulted in a tremendous failure. Captain Brenton, to gratify national complacency, grossly exaggerates in his 'Naval History' the difficulty of the enterprise. 'Of all places which ever came under our inspection none, we conceive, is more invulnerable to attack or more easily defended than Teneriffe.' He forgets to mention its principal guard, the valour of the inhabitants. And now to my translation. 'At dawn on July 2, [Footnote: James (_Naval History_, vol. ii. p. 56) more correctly says July 20. So the _Despatches, &c., of Lord Nelson_, Sir H. Nicholas, vol. ii. p. 429. The thanksgiving for the victory took place on July 27, the fête of SS. Iago and Cristobal.] 1797, the squadron [Footnote: The squadron was composed as follows:--1. _Theseus_ (74), Captain Ralph Willett Miller, carried the Rear-Admiral's flag; 2. _Culloden_ (74), Commodore and Captain Thos. Troubridge; 3. _Zealous_ (74), Captain Sam. Hood; 4. _Leander_ (50), Captain Thos. Boulden Thomson, which joined on the day before the attack. There were three frigates:--1. _Seahorse_ (38), Captain Thos. Francis Fremantle; 2. _Emerald_ (36), Captain John Waller; and 3. _Terpsichore_ (32), Captain Richard Bowen; also the _Fox_ (cutter), Lieut. Commander John Gibson, and a mortar-boat or a bomb-ketch, probably a ship's launch with a shell-gun.] of Rear-Admiral Horatio Nelson, K.B., composed of nine ships, and carrying a total of 393 guns, appeared off Santa Cruz, the port of Tenerife, Canarian archipelago. The enemy at once manned and put off his boats. One division of sixteen occupied our front; the other twenty-three took the direction of the Bufadero valley, a wild gap two or three miles to the north of the harbour.