Always prompt to strike at the heart, the commander-in-chief determined to march straight on Acre, where that notorious Turkish pacha sat intrenched behind weak walls and the ramparts of terror which his calculating ferocity had reared around him.  Ever since the age of the Crusades that seaport had been the chief place of arms of Palestine; but the harbour was now nearly silted up, and even the neighbouring roadstead of Hayfa was desolate.  The fortress was formidable only to orientals.  In his work, “Les Ruines,” Volney had remarked about Acre:  “Through all this part of Asia bastions, lines of defence, covered ways, ramparts, and in short everything relating to modern fortification are utterly unknown; and a single thirty-gun frigate would easily bombard and lay in ruins the whole coast.”  This judgment of his former friend undoubtedly lulled Bonaparte into illusory confidence, and the rank and file after their success at Jaffa expected an easy triumph at Acre.

This would doubtless have happened but for British help.  Captain Miller, of H.M.S.  “Theseus,” thus reported on the condition of Acre before Sir Sidney Smith’s arrival: 

“I found almost every embrasure empty except those towards the sea.  Many years’ collection of the dirt of the town thrown in such a situation as completely covered the approach to the gate from the only guns that could flank it and from the sea ... none of their batteries have casemates, traverses, or splinter-proofs:  they have many guns, but generally small and defective—­the carriages in general so.” [115]

Captain Miller’s energy made good some of these defects; but the place was still lamentably weak when, on March 15th, Sir Sidney Smith arrived.  The English squadron in the east of the Mediterranean had, to Nelson’s chagrin, been confided to the command of this ardent young officer, who now had the good fortune to capture off the promontory of Mount Carmel seven French vessels containing Bonaparte’s siege-train.  This event had a decisive influence on the fortunes of the siege and of the whole campaign.  The French cannon were now hastily mounted on the very walls that they had been intended to breach; while the gun vessels reinforced the two English frigates, and were ready to pour a searching fire on the assailants in their trenches or as they rushed against the walls.  These had also been hastily strengthened under the direction of a French royalist officer named Phelippeaux, an old schoolfellow of Bonaparte, and later on a comrade of Sidney Smith, alike in his imprisonment and in his escape from the clutches of the revolutionists.  Sharing the lot of the adventurous young seaman, Phelippeaux sailed to the Levant, and now brought to the defence of Acre the science of a skilled engineer.  Bravely seconded by British officers and seamen, he sought to repair the breach effected by the French field-pieces, and constructed at the most exposed points inner defences, before which the most obstinate efforts of the storming parties melted away.  Nine times did the assailants advance against the breaches with the confidence born of unfailing success and redoubled by the gaze of their great commander; but as often were they beaten back by the obstinate bravery of the British seamen and Turks.