This is no exaggeration.  There is the port of Cherbourg.  Originally it was little more than an open bay, hollowed by the waters of the English Channel in the French coast, with a rocky shore exposed to every northern blast.  But it was situated just where France needed a harbor, midway on her northern coast, facing England.  Across this open bay, as a chord subtends its arc, a gigantic sea-wall has been stretched.  Built in deep water more than a mile from the head of the bay, it extends almost from shore to shore.  It is nearly three miles long.  It is scarcely less than nine hundred feet wide at its base.  Rising from the bed of the sea sixty-six feet, it is firm enough to bear up fortresses strong as human engineering can rear.  This is the famous digue of Cherbourg.  Its construction has been a seventy years’ battle with the elements.  Many times the waves have destroyed the work of years.  Once a furious tempest swept away the whole superstructure, with its forts, armaments, barracks, and even garrison.  But failure has only awakened fresh energy, and it stands now complete and rooted in the sea like a reef.  At each end of the digue, between it and the main land, are broad ship-channels, affording a free passage at all tides to the largest ships.  Thus science has called into existence a safe harbor, protected from the assaults of the sea by its granite barrier,—­protected none the less from man’s assaults by the concentric fire of more than six hundred guns.

This is but the exterior of Cherbourg.  In the bosom of the rocky cliffs of its western shore three basins or docks have been hewn with gigantic toil.  The first, finished in 1813, is 950 feet long, 768 feet wide, and 55 feet deep, and will hold securely fifteen ships of the line.  The second, of somewhat smaller dimensions, was completed in 1829, and will float a dozen ships.  The third, far larger than either, was opened with great ceremony in 1858:  it is 1365 feet long, 650 feet wide, and 60 feet deep, and will contain eighteen or twenty ships of the largest size.  On the sides of these basins are twelve building-slips and seven docks.  And radiating from them, and in close contiguity, are arsenals, storehouses, timber-yards, ropewalks, sail-lofts, bakeries, and machine-shops capable of turning out marine engines, anchors, cables, and indeed every piece of iron-work which enters into the construction of a ship.  It is no vain boast that an army of a hundred thousand men can be embarked any fine morning at Cherbourg, and that the fleet necessary for its transport can be built and armed and equipped and protected to the hour of its departure in this fortified haven.