United States or Christmas Island ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
The sieges of the Peninsular War are not an exception, for Wellington was from a military, though not from a political point of view, as much an invader as the lieutenants of Napoleon. Baden-Powell is a suppressed personality whose merit was not fully recognized. With scarcely an exception, no individual leader was more self-reliant, or handled imperfect tools with greater skill.
The careful tillage, the beautiful system of irrigation by aqueduct and canal, the scientific processes by which these "accursed" had caused the wilderness to bloom with cotton, sugar, and every kind of fruit and grain; the untiring industry, exquisite ingenuity, and cultivated taste by which the merchants, manufacturers, and mechanics, guilty of a darker complexion than that of the peninsular Goths, had enriched their native land with splendid fabrics in cloth, paper, leather, silk, tapestry, and by so doing had acquired fortunes for themselves, despite iniquitous taxation, religious persecution, and social contumely all these were crimes against a race of idlers, steeped to the lips in sloth which imagined itself to be pride.
In six weeks he marched more than five hundred miles, crossed six rivers, and, using the Navarrese revolt as the anvil, dealt the hammer-stroke of Vittoria. It cost Napoleon 151 pieces of cannon, nearly all the stores piled up for his Peninsular campaigns and Spain itself. As for Joseph, he left his carriage and fled on horseback towards France, reaching St.
Having procured a black Padre for a guide, and a Spaniard who had served in the Peninsular war as an interpreter, we visited a collection of buildings, of which an ancient church formed the principal part. It is here the governors and captain-generals of the islands have been buried. Some of the tombstones recorded dates of the sixteenth century. The Cape de Verd Islands were discovered in 1449.
He had looked forward to an autumn at Fairoaks; and perhaps the idea of passing two or three months there did not amuse the young man. "There is not a soul to speak to in the place," he said to Warrington. "I can't stand old Portman's sermons, and pompous after-dinner conversation. I know all old Glanders's stories about the Peninsular war.
He afterwards served with distinction through the Peninsular war, and, after receiving a ball in the knee at Vittoria, closed his military career at the battle of Waterloo. It is not a little singular that Mr. Hensley, another of the principal inhabitants, and a near neighbour of Captain Swabey's, fought at Copenhagen under Lord Nelson, where part of his cheek- bone was shot away.
If not actively loyal it was peaceably disposed until the arrival of Pretorius, who soon drove out the British Resident and the little garrison of Bloemfontein and set them on the run as far as Colesberg in the Cape Colony. He was defeated at Boomplatz in August, 1848, by Sir Harry Smith, a veteran of the Peninsular War, and British authority was for a time reestablished over the Sovereignty.
A force of nine thousand Peninsular veterans which marched in September to the attack of Plattsburg on Lake Champlain was forced to fall back by the defeat of the English flotilla which accompanied it. A second force under General Packenham appeared in December at the mouth of the Mississippi and attacked New Orleans, but was repulsed by General Jackson with the loss of half its numbers.
No; every indication is that his eye was still fixed on England at her vital point, and that he took his measures in the North to deal her such a thrust that the life-blood which sustained the Peninsular war would either flow inefficacious, or be turned away altogether from Spain, and change the ever-doubtful success of Wellington into assured disaster.
A certain New York paper, called the "Sunday Times," has thought fit for some time past to fill its columns with a story of the Peninsular war, announcing it as "by the author of Charles O'Malley."
Word Of The Day