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Updated: June 28, 2025
It was an old thing, and spoke of the flat-bottoms of our foes and the possibility of their coming over in darkness, and alluded to threats of an invasion many years blown over; and when he came to the part "We'll still make 'em run, and we'll still make 'em sweat, In spite of the devil and 'Brussels Gazette," his eyes would sparkle as with the freshness of an impending event.
A modest outlook in comparison; and this is what it also has come to. As for the Grand Invasion Squadron, Admiral Conflans, commanding it, still holds up his head in Brest Harbor, and talks big. Makes little of Rodney's havoc on the Flat-bottoms at Havre, 'Will soon have Flat-bottoms again: and you shall see! if only Hawke, and wind and weather and Fortune, will permit."
Extremely slow was my advance, for at first I would not leave any ship, however remotely small, without approaching sufficiently to investigate her, at least with the spy-glass: and a strange multitudinous mixture of species they were, trawlers in hosts, war-ships of every nation, used, it seemed, as passenger-boats, smacks, feluccas, liners, steam-barges, great four-masters with sails, Channel boats, luggers, a Venetian burchiello, colliers, yachts, remorqueurs, training ships, dredgers, two dahabeeahs with curving gaffs, Marseilles fishers, a Maltese speronare, American off-shore sail, Mississippi steam-boats, Sorrento lug-schooners, Rhine punts, yawls, old frigates and three-deckers, called to novel use, Stromboli caiques, Yarmouth tubs, xebecs, Rotterdam flat-bottoms, floats, mere gunwaled rafts anything from anywhere that could bear a human freight on water had come, and was here: and all, I knew, had been making westward, or northward, or both; and all, I knew, were crowded; and all were tombs, listlessly wandering, my God, on the wandering sea with their dead.
Besides their Grand Brest Fleet, with new Flat-bottoms, and world-famous land-preparations going on at Vannes, for Invasion of proud Albion, all which are at present under Hawke's strict keeping, the French have, ever since Spring last, a fine subsidiary Fleet at Toulon, of very exultant hopes at one time; which now come to finis.
At Vannes, where Hawke likewise has ships watching, are multifarious preparations; new Flat-bottoms, 18,000 troops, could Conflans and they only get to sea. At the long last, they did get; in manner following: "November 9th, a wild gale of wind had blown Hawke out of sight; away home to Torbay, for the moment.
"It would take a better Frenchman," said the Admiral, with that brevity which is the happy result of stoutness up steep hill, "than any of 'they flat-bottoms, as Swipes, my gardener, calls them, to get through these prickles, Stubbard, without Sark-blewing. Such a wonderfully thin-skinned lot they are! Did I ever tell you the story of our boatswain's mate?
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