So Hood, with that inspiration of genius so common then among sailors, laid his seventy-four, the Centaur, close alongside the Diamond; made a hawser, with a traveller on it, fast to the ship and to the top of the rock; and in January 1804 got three long 24’s and two 18’s hauled up far above his masthead by sailors who, as they ‘hung like clusters,’ appeared ’like mice hauling a little sausage.  Scarcely could we hear the Governor on the top directing them with his trumpet; the Centaur lying close under, like a cocoa-nut shell, to which the hawsers are affixed.’ {36} In this strange fortress Lieutenant James Wilkie Maurice (let his name be recollected as one of England’s forgotten worthies) was established, with 120 men and boys, and ammunition, provisions, and water, for four months; and the rock was borne on the books of the Admiralty as His Majesty’s ship Diamond Rock, and swept the seas with her guns till the 1st of June 1805, when she had to surrender, for want of powder, to a French squadron of two 74’s, a frigate, a corvette, a schooner, and eleven gunboats, after killing and wounding some seventy men on the rock alone, and destroying three gunboats, with a loss to herself of two men killed and one wounded.  Remembering which story, who will blame the traveller if he takes off his hat to His Majesty’s quondam corvette, as he sees for the first time its pink and yellow sides shining in the sun, above the sparkling seas over which it domineered of old?  You run onwards toward St. Lucia.  Across that channel Rodney’s line of frigates watched for the expected reinforcement of the French fleet.  The first bay in St. Lucia is Gros islet; and there is the Gros islet itself—­Pigeon Rock, as the English call it—­behind which Rodney’s fleet lay waiting at anchor, while he himself sat on the top of the rock, day after day, spy-glass in hand, watching for the signals from his frigates that the French fleet was on the move.

And those glens and forests of St. Lucia—­over them and through them Sir John Moore and Sir Ralph Abercrombie fought, week after week, month after month, not merely against French soldiers, but against worse enemies; ‘Brigands,’ as the poor fellows were called; Negroes liberated by the Revolution of 1792.  With their heads full (and who can blame them?) of the Rights of Man, and the democratic teachings of that valiant and able friend of Robespierre, Victor Hugues, they had destroyed their masters, man, woman, and child, horribly enough, and then helped to drive out of the island the invading English, who were already half destroyed, not with fighting, but with fever.  And now ‘St. Lucia the faithful,’ as the Convention had named her, was swarming with fresh English; and the remaining French and the drilled Negroes made a desperate stand in the earthworks of yonder Morne Fortunee, above the harbour, and had to surrender, with 100 guns and all their stores; and then the poor black fellows,