United States or Malta ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Out in the roadstead five small gunboats were tacking and blazing away, two at the mole and three at the town itself; and the town and the island blazing and banging back at the gunboats. We could not see the town battery, but the island one mounted three guns, and Sir John's spy-glass showed the people there running from one to another like emmets.
After being at sea about a week, on reduced rations both of food and of water, we ran one night into the roadstead of Pisco, landed, and before daylight had made ourselves masters of the town, the Royalists hurriedly retreating. On board the schooner I had obtained a much-needed rest, but directly my feet touched the shore I was set to work again.
I gathered from the sealers that neither the promontory separating St. Vincent from Spencer's Gulf, nor the neighbourhood of Port Lincoln, are other than barren and sandy wastes. They all agree in describing Port Lincoln itself as a magnificent roadstead, but equally agree as to the sterility of its shores.
On the 1st July he resumed his march, and passing a bridge over a small stream at a place called Leffingen, laying down a road as he went with sods and sand, and throwing bridges over streams and swamps, he arrived in the forenoon before Nieuport. The fleet had reached the roadstead the same morning.
On the following morning, having been assisted to rise and dress by the two nurses whose especial charge I was, and established by them near an open window overlooking the roadstead, I was making play with a particularly appetising breakfast when, glancing out of the window, I saw a big fleet of transports arriving there were eighty-three in all, for I had the curiosity to count them; and while they were coming to an anchor another fleet appeared, consisting of the warships which had been to Port Arthur to assist in the attempt to seal up the harbour.
The roadstead first catches the eye; it stretches east and west, penetrates inland to a depth of four miles and three-quarters, with a mean breadth of 1,000 yards; and forms the channel of communication between Sevastopol and the interior of the peninsula. The northern shore is girt by a line of cliffs; the southern shore, broken up by numerous natural basins.
It was during this same visit that there occurred a terrible combat in the roadstead of Boulogne to secure the entrance into the port of a flotilla composed of twenty or thirty vessels, which came from Ostend, from Dunkirk, and from Nieuport, loaded with arms for the national fleet.
The cities had no harbours Croton alone had a paltry roadstead and they had no commerce of their own; the Sybarite prided himself on growing gray between the bridges of his lagoon-city, and Milesians and Etruscans bought and sold for him.
The white ones are very large, and their down is equal to that of the swan. At last Cape Horn and its swelling seas were left behind, and we reached Valparaiso in about sixty days from Rio. We anchored in the open roadstead, and spent there about ten days, visiting all the usual places of interest, its foretop, main-top, mizzen-top, etc.
As the ship came into the roadstead which served as a harbor, the town lay spread out before them: in the foreground, straggling along the beach and for some distance back, were the adobe houses of the inhabitants, about one hundred in number, most of them glittering white in the brilliant sunlight; among them, somewhat distant from the shore, was the huge, low building of the presidio, frowning out over the rest of the scene; beyond the houses, and nearly two miles from the water, was the mission, a large group of buildings, from the midst of which rose the white two-towered Moorish church.
Word Of The Day