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Updated: September 12, 2025
Still the patient Bucquoy went on, day after day, night after night, month after month, planting his faggots and fascines, creeping forward almost imperceptibly with his dyke, paying five florins each to the soldiers who volunteered to bring the materials, and a double ducat to each man employed in laying them.
The original plan of the works had not been fully carried out; and owing, it is said, to the bad quality of the mortar, the masonry of the ramparts was in so poor a condition that it had been replaced in some parts with fascines. The circuit of the fortifications was more than a mile and a half, and the town contained about four thousand inhabitants.
I cannot speak in terms too high of the judicious disposition of the guns, their admirable practice, or the activity with which the cannonade was sustained; but notwithstanding the formidable calibre of our iron guns, mortars, and howitzers, and the admirable way in which they were served, and aided by a rocket battery, it would have been visionary to expect that they could, within any limited time, silence the fire of seventy pieces behind well-constructed batteries of earth, plank, and fascines, or dislodge troops covered either by redoubts or epaulements, or within a treble line of trenches.
The regiments were at once set to manufacture fascines for the siege, and this work proceeded quickly, the orchards and plantations furnishing an abundance of wood. The fascines were used for filling up ditches, and the advances against the town were pushed forward with vigour.
As the dawn widened, one of the men opened his lantern and blew out the candle within it. The young officer it was Archibald Plinlimmon paused in his search and scanned the sky and the ramparts above. I sent down a feeble hail. He heard. His eyes searched along the heaped ruins of gabions, fascines, and dead bodies; and, recognising me, he came slowly up the slope. "Hallo!" said he.
Being joined by them and by the Creek Indians, and having made a sufficient number of fascines and short ladders, provided all other necessaries for attacking the intrenchments, and brought up thirty-six cohorns, he received notice that the Commodore had resolved to forego the attack; declaring, that, as the season of hurricanes was approaching, he judged it imprudent to hazard his Majesty's ships any longer on the coast.
Consolidation of the scarps of the ravines by grading and wattling and establishing barriers, sometimes of solid masonry, but generally of fascines or any other simple materials at hand, across the bed of the stream.
A few mortars stood in position by the river side, and there were Parrott, Griffin, and Dahlgren pieces in the shore batteries. However numerous and powerful were the Federal fortifications, they bore no comparison, in either respect, to those relinquished by the revolutionists. Miniature mountain ranges they seemed, deeply ditched, and revetted with sods, fascines, hurdles, gabions or sand bags.
The tents of the King could only be communicated with by paths laid with fascines which required to be renewed every day, as they sank down into the soil. The camps and quarters were no longer accessible; the trenches were full of mud and water, and it took often three days to remove cannon from one battery to another.
This event was immediately communicated to Caupolican, who hastily collected his forces, and passed the Biobio on the 9th of August, and next morning at day-break, a day remarkable in Europe by the defeat of the French at St Quintin, he assailed the new fortress on three sides at once, having sent on in front a body of pioneers to fill up the ditch with fascines and trunks of trees.
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