Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: June 14, 2025
On the 25th April the army, having crossed the mouth of the West Scheld, from Zeeland, in numberless vessels of all sizes and degrees, effected their debarkation on the island of Cadzand. In the course of two days they had taken possession of the little town, and all the forts of that island, having made their entrance through what was called the Black Channel.
The American troops made a landing on the eastern side of Guantanamo Harbour, forty miles east of Santiago, at two P. M. on the tenth of June. The debarkation was effected under the cover of the guns of the Oregon, Marblehead, Dolphin, and Vixen.
The points selected for debarkation were Siboney, a small village about ten miles east of Morro Castle, and Daiquiri, another similar village five miles farther away, which, before the war, was the shipping-port of the Spanish-American Iron Company.
There was the boisterous hilarity of people who felt their feet once more on solid ground, after a long and weary voyage; the shouting of sailors and bargemen in the boats, and of soldiers and natives on the beach; the talking and laughing of men and women who had struck up sudden friendships on landing, as well as of those who had crossed the sea together; the gambolling and the shrieking delight of children freed from the restraints of shipboard; the shouts of indignant Government officials who could not get their orders attended to; the querulous demands of people whose luggage had gone astray in process of debarkation; the bawling of colonial Dutch by gigantic Dutch-African farmers, in broad-brimmed hats and leathern crackers, with big tobacco-pipes in their mouths; the bellowing of oxen in reply to the pistol-shot cuts applied to their flanks by half-naked Hottentots and Bushmen, whose whips were bamboos of twenty feet or so in length, with lashes twice as long; the creaking of Cape-waggons, the barking of dogs, and, as a measured accompaniment to all, the solemn regular booming of the restless sea.
Ocean steamers were not then common, and the passage was made in sailing vessels. At that time there was not more than three feet of water in the channel at the outlet of Corpus Christi Bay; the debarkation, therefore, had to take place by small steamers, and at an island in the channel called Shell Island, the ships anchoring some miles out from shore.
Pemberton got back to Vicksburg before Sherman got there. The rebel positions were on a bluff on the Yazoo River, some miles above its mouth. The waters were high so that the bottoms were generally overflowed, leaving only narrow causeways of dry land between points of debarkation and the high bluffs. These were fortified and defended at all points.
All our boats, however, had not yet reached the point of debarkation; those with the stores, artillery, &c., &c., being still some distance in the rear. Our party was now placed with the right centre column, at the head of which marched our noble acquaintance.
What sounds of foreign hymns, forgotten now, were these, and what solemnity of debarkation? Was this grave form, Columbus? Yet these were not so Spanish as they seemed just now. This group of stern-faced men with high peaked hats, who knelt upon the cold deck and looked out upon a shore which, I could see by their joyless smile of satisfaction, was rough, and bare, and forbidding.
Love and anxiety had made the lad thin. Any night might bring disastrous news from Three Rivers, the burning of the settlement and the massacre. Such speculation counteracted his usually good appetite. So Breton mooned about the wharves day by day, always looking up the river instead of down. To-day he lingered to witness the debarkation.
It will be observed that the two hypotheses are mutually conflicting, and that neither accounts for debarkation at a part of Tsukushi conspicuously remote from Korea. It is not wholly impossible, however, that Ninigi came from China, and that the Court which is said to have commissioned him was a Chinese Court.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking