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Updated: May 20, 2025
The Gullet, or new eastern entrance, was a whirlpool at high tide, deep, broad, and swift as a millrace. Yet along its outer verge he too laid his sausages, protecting his men at their work as well as he could with gabions, and essayed to build a dyke of wicker-work upon which he might place a platform for artillery to prevent the ingress of the republican ships.
Many a fine fellow slept his last sleep on earth that night, and many a strong man before the next sunset was to be a helpless cripple. A soldier, above all men, may be thankful that he does not know what is before him. Gabions are like large round hampers, without top or bottom, to be filled with earth. Fascines are like long, tight fagots.
Others did fortify and rampire their walls, set up little fortresses, bastions, squared ravelins, digged trenches, cleansed countermines, fenced themselves with gabions, contrived platforms, emptied casemates, barricaded the false brays, erected the cavaliers, repaired the counterscarps, plastered the curtains, lengthened ravelins, stopped parapets, morticed barbacans, assured the portcullises, fastened the herses, sarasinesques, and cataracts, placed their sentries, and doubled their patrol.
The intervening ground had already been stripped of its hedges, and the trees cut down to form gabions, fascines, and platforms for the cannon. Thousands of men were at work; but in some parts they were clustered much more thickly than in others, and Vincent had no difficulty in determining where the principal batteries were in course of construction along this portion of the position.
When it was ascertained that no enemy was near, they piled their arms, and set to work with brave determination to restore the defences. Temporary parapets of loose clods were thrown up, the earth was cleared out of the ditch, gabions were filled to block up the main breaches, and palisades fixed to impede the progress of assailants through others.
By the side of each of these batteries other workmen were strengthening gabions filled with earth, the lining of another battery. The latter had embrasures, and the overseer of the works called successively men who, with cords, tied the saucissons and cut the lozenges and right angles of turfs destined to retain the matting of the embrasures.
Nevertheless we had no sooner passed the bridge of the Coa than we discovered our mistake; the roads below Almeida being choked with a continuous train of mule transports, tumbrils, light carts, and wagons heaped with fascines, gabions, long balks of timber, sheaves of spades and siege implements all crawling southwards.
Some of the vessels were laden with provisions, others with gabions, hurdles, branches, sacks of sand and of wool, and with other materials for the rapid throwing up of fortifications. It was two o'clock, half an hour before the chill dawn of a May morning, Sunday, the 26th of the month. The pale sight of a waning moon was faintly perceptible in the sky.
The master-of-camp had the king of Tidore summoned immediately, and, while awaiting Don Pedro de Acuna, rested his men and cleaned the ships, and made gabions and other things necessary for the war. Don Pedro de Acuna, through his pilots' fault, had gone thirty leguas to leeward of the island of Terrenate toward the island of Celebes, otherwise called Mateo.
In these sorties the Spanish works were frequently held for a few minutes, gabions thrown down, and guns overturned, but after doing as much damage as they could the assailants had to fall back again to the town, being unable to resist the masses of pikemen brought up against them.
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