Bonaparte had foreseen that of all the Syrian towns the Pasha's capital, St. Jean d'Acre, which was on the shore, and not inland like the places so easily taken, would make the strongest resistance. Accordingly he had provided a siege-train, and had despatched it by sea from Alexandria. The English squadron in those waters, now in command of Sir Sidney Smith, was in the offing when the French army arrived on the coast. Approaching in order to open fire, the English admiral became aware after a few shots that his enemy had no artillery. Divining the reason, he swiftly put to sea, and easily captured their transports. Phélippeaux, a French emigrant who had graduated from the military school at Paris only two days before Bonaparte, was sent by Smith to superintend the fortification of the city with the very guns destined for its destruction. The siege of Acre thus became a task quite different from any hitherto imposed on the French. Supported by an English fleet, and easily provisioned under protection of their guns, the city might have made a determined stand even against an enemy with cannon; but to one without artillery it was likely that its resistance would be effectual. And so it proved; for under the ancient Gothic walls of a city whose name recalled the fleeting dominion of the Frank crusaders, Bonaparte's dreams of an Oriental empire vanished forever. On March nineteenth he sat down before them, with really no dependence except on fate. In spite of discouragements, however, a breach was effected on the twenty-eighth by means of a mine, but the assault was repulsed. Day followed day without an important incident, until in the third week an army of twenty-five thousand men, under Abdullah, approached from Damascus to relieve Jezzar. Kléber set out to check their march, and the first skirmish of advance-guards occurred at Nazareth. For eight hours Junot, in the van with a few hundred men, stood firm against a tenfold force; and even when the whole French division arrived the overwhelming superiority of the Turkish numbers was not perceptibly diminished. Bonaparte was not far behind. Leaving a respectable array before the town to keep up appearances, he hurried away with the rest, and by a forced march debouched on April sixteenth into the plain of Esdraelon. In the distance, at the foot of Mount Tabor, he could see a cloud of dust and smoke, in the midst of which the ranks of Kléber's division seemed buried beneath the masses of his foe. Throwing his fine cavalry on the Turkish flanks, the commander-in-chief, at the head of the infantry, caught his enemy unawares from behind the whirling sand which had concealed his presence. The result was an utter rout of the Turks, who fled by the mountain passes in complete disorder.