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Updated: June 6, 2025
A minute later Cappy Ricks, smoking his after-dinner cigar on the bridge of the Narcissus with her skipper and Mike Murphy, pointed far off the port bow. "There's a shark or a swordfish, or something, breaching," he said. "I can see his wake."
The efficacy of cannon in breaching solid masonry was taught Europe by the Turks, a few years after wards, at the memorable siege of Constantinople. In our French wars, as in the wars of the classic nations, famine was looked on as the surest weapon to compel the submission of a well-walled town and the great object of the besiegers was to effect a complete circumvallation.
Rising with his utmost velocity from the furthest depths, the Sperm Whale thus booms his entire bulk into the pure element of air, and piling up a mountain of dazzling foam, shows his place to the distance of seven miles and more. In those moments, the torn, enraged waves he shakes off, seem his mane; in some cases, this breaching is his act of defiance.
The besiegers encamped a furlong from the walls, and made roads; kept their pikemen in camp ready for an assault when practicable; and sent forward their sappers, pioneers, catapultiers, and crossbowmen. These opened a siege by filling the moat, and mining, or breaching the wall, etc.
The round-house was built very strong, to support the breaching of the seas. Of its five apertures, only the skylight and the two doors were large enough for the passage of a man. The doors, besides, could be drawn close: they were of stout oak, and ran in grooves, and were fitted with hooks to keep them either shut or open, as the need arose.
The enemy had calculated that this outwork would have kept us at bay for a fortnight or three weeks; whereas, its capture, the first night, enabled us to break ground at once, within breaching distance of the walls of the town.
They had the ranges well marked, too, and huge rents began to show in our parapets, strings of casualties began to trickle back to the dressing stations in a stream that was to flow steady and unbroken for many days and nights. But the enemy defences showed more and quicker signs of damage, especially at the main points, where the massed guns were busy breaching the selected spots.
His visit was of scarcely five minutes' duration; but was evidently the opening of a breaching battery by the Bingham family in all form the object of which I could at least guess at. My embarrassments were not destined to end here; for scarcely had I returned Mr. Bingham's eighth salutation at the head of the staircase, when another individual presented himself before me.
His men had already taken full possession of the building, some of them being engaged in loopholing the shutters of the ground-floor windows that commanded the street, while others, in the courtyard that overlooked the meadows in the rear, were breaching the wall for musketry.
The escalade of the wall of the ravine, the breaching of the rampart, the storming of the fort, its defence, its abandonment and recapture, was one of the most gallant and heroic exploits ever performed in American history.
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