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Updated: June 28, 2025
This enormous wall, composed throughout of large hewn blocks, rose in two stories, exclusive of the battlements and the huge towers four stories high, to a height of 45 feet, and furnished in the lower range of the casemates stables and provender-stores for 300 elephants, in the upper range stalls for horses, magazines, and barracks.
The latter resemble the Stevens Battery in the shape and position of their armor, but carry their guns within their casemates.
Two officers were dangerously wounded, in one of the casemates of the King's Bastion; and the fire was so heavy, around some of the barracks, that all the troops who could not be disposed of, in the casemates and bomb-proofs, were sent out of the town and encamped southward and, the next day, all the women and children who had gone with their husbands and fathers into the casemates were also removed, and placed under canvas.
Remembering the usages of merry England, they clubbed together, and swore they would have four meals of meat a day, wax-candles in the casemates, and their porter.
Two or three casemates still remain, appearing like the mouths of huge ovens, surmounted by a great mass of earth and stone. These caverns, originally the safeguards of powder and other combustible munitions of war, now serve to shelter the flocks of sheep that graze upon the grass that conceals them.
Massive fortifications rising from its foot to its summit defended every point where the rock was not absolutely perpendicular. These walls were of enormous thickness, and in casemates or recesses in their thickness were the stables for the elephants, horses, and cattle of the garrison.
He tells me that the commandant says that one list must be made. On this the orders of each of the casemates must be put down separately. A sergeant will go out every day with it. Money must be given to him to cover the full extent of the orders. He will return the change, each day, when he hands in the articles required.
As the first tongues of flame shot up the British concentrated on them. The French ran to the threatened spot and worked hard, in spite of the storm of British shot and shell. But nothing was saved, except Drucour's own quarters. During the confusion the wind blew some burning debris against the timbers which protected the nearest casemates from exploding shells.
All their guns, which have been only twelve months here, are already in very bad order, from exposure to the climate and surf. The casemates are so damp, that their interior is covered constantly with a thick nitrous incrustation."
Standing on Tower Hill, looking down on the dark lines of wall picking out keep and turret, bastion and ballium, chapel and belfry the jewel-house, armory, the mounts, the casemates, the open leads, the Bye-ward-gate, the Belfry, the Bloody tower the whole edifice seems alive with story the story of a nation's highest splendor, its deepest misery, and its darkest shame.
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