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Updated: June 14, 2025
Napoleon compelled Spain by the threat of invasion to pay him a large subsidy: England declared this payment, and accompanying acts, to be acts of war; Spain shuffled uneasily between the two belligerents but continued to supply funds to Napoleon and to shelter and repair his warships; thereupon England resolved to cut off her American subsidies, but sent a force too small to preclude the possibility of a sea-fight; the fight took place, with a lamentable result, which changed the covert hostility of Spain into active hostility.
And on his right hand was the sea always, and Salamis, with its island cliffs, and the sacred strait of the sea-fight, where afterwards the Persians fled before the Greeks. So he went all day, until the evening, till he saw the Thriasian plain, and the sacred city of Eleusis, where the Earth-mother's temple stands.
After making various remarks, he continues: "The greatest advantage in a sea-fight is to get the wind of one another; for he that has the wind is out of danger of being boarded, and has the advantage where to board and how to attempt the enemy.
Some of them forbade him to neglect or disobey the warning, quoting the famous old instances of Menækeus the son of Kreon and Makaria the daughter of Herakles, and, in later times, Pherekydes the philosopher, who was killed by the Lacedæmonians, and whose skin, according to some oracle, is still kept by their kings, and Leonidas, who following the oracle did in some sort offer himself as a victim on behalf of Greece; and futhermore they spoke of those persons whom Themistokles sacrificed to Dionysus before the sea-fight at Salamis.
The news of their intended retreat, and its untoward interruption, so raised the spirits of the Syracusans, that they resolved to risk another sea-fight, and after some days spent in training their crews, they sailed out with seventy-six ships, and offered battle, and Gylippus at the same time attacked the Athenian lines by land.
Eumenes, who had gone to join his fleet at Elaea, returned a few days after, with twenty-four decked ships, and a greater number of open ones, to Phocaea, where were the Romans, who were fitting and preparing themselves for a sea-fight.
This figure also suits an admiral, or commander at sea, when a sea-fight is introduced instead of a landskip." Such a figure may, indeed, be more at home at sea, and such a one may have been that famous lady, whose captain so "very much applauded her," and "Made her the first lieutenant Of the gallant Thunder Bomb." Not a painter of the present day, it seems, knows how to paint the clergy.
Neacles also painted for Aratus; and we might almost suppose that it was as a gift to the King of Egypt that he painted his Sea-fight between the Egyptians and the Persians, in which the painter shows us that it was fought within the mouth of the Nile by making a crocodile bite at an ass drinking on the shore.
To your list of illustrative personifications, into which a fine imagination enters, I will take leave to add the following from Beaumont and Fletcher's "Wife for a Month;" 'tis the conclusion of a description of a sea-fight: "The game of death was never played so nobly; the meagre thief grew wanton in his mischiefs, and his shrunk, hollow eyes smiled on his ruins."
Below, Jean Touzel had eyes only for this sea-fight before him, for, despite the enormous difference, the Englishmen were now fighting their little craft for all that she was capable. But the odds were terribly against her, though she had the windward side, and the firing of the privateer was bad. The carronades on her flush decks were replying valiantly to the twelve-pounders of the brig.
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