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Bayonne was the scene of a struggle between a few privileged families, which sought to monopolise municipal office, and a popular opposition based upon the seafaring class. The neighbouring princes cast greedy eyes on a land so rich, divided, and helpless. Theobald IV., the poet, Count of Champagne and King of Navarre, coveted the valley of the Adour.
It was necessary to provide Sir John Hope with a number of small boats; these were accordingly brought on the backs of mules from various Spanish ports, it being impossible, on account of the surf at the entrance of the Adour, as well as the command which the French held of that river, for Lord Wellington to avail himself of water carriage.
On the west coast of France a belt of dunes, varying in width from a quarter of a mile to five miles, extends from the Adour to the estuary of the Gironde, and covers an area of nine hundred and seventy square kilometres, or two hundred and forty thousand acres. When not fixed by vegetable growths, these dunes advance eastwards at a mean rate of about one rod, or sixteen and a half feet, a year.
I saw this absurd proclamation, which was published in French and in the Basque languages, and distributed all over the country. Before we left the neighbourhood of Bayonne for Bordeaux, a soldier was hanged for robbery, on the sands of the Adour. This sort of punishment astonished the French almost as much as it did the soldier.
The rivers Nive and Adour unite in the town of Bayonne, so that while we were threatening to storm the works on one side, Sir Rowland Hill passed the Nive, without opposition, on the other, and took up his ground, with his right on the Adour and his left on the Nive, on a contracted space, within a very short distance of the walls of the town.
Bayonne was a strongly fortified place, standing on the junction of the Nive and Adour, and on the south side of the latter river, two miles from its mouth. The Nive ran through the town, and its waters supplied the ditches of the encircling wall and bastions. The prison was situated on the Nive, at some three or four hundred yards from the spot where it entered the Adour.
It is a city of some thirty thousand inhabitants, situated at the junction of the Adour and Nive rivers, in the Lower Pyrenees. Here again the cathedral forms the principal attraction to travellers. Though very plain and with little architectural merit, still it is very old, gray and crumbling, plainly telling the story of its age.
Yet here it was that the will of a great prince had now assembled a gallant army; so that from the Adour to the passes of Navarre the barren valleys and wind-swept wastes were populous with soldiers and loud with the shouting of orders and the neighing of horses.
At Bayonne there was a better class of Carlist sympathizers; such of them as were of the fighting age were there in the intervals of duty. To a job-master's in the city by the Adour I was recommended as the most likely place to procure a steed. At the Hôtel St. He went with me to the job-master's it is as well to have a friend with you when you do a horse-deal. I had no choice but Hobson's.
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