three ships of the line, carrying
five thousand eight hundred cannon and twenty-nine thousand sailors. A
grave fault was committed in not throwing at least twenty thousand men
into Ireland with such means as were disposable. Two years later, De
Tourville had been conquered in the famous day of La Hogue, and the
remains of the troops which had landed were enabled to return through
the instrumentality of a treaty which required their evacuation of the
island.

At the beginning of the eighteenth century, the Swedes and Russians
undertook two expeditions very different in character.

Charles XII., wishing to aid the Duke of Holstein, made a descent upon
Denmark at the head of twenty thousand men, transported by two hundred
vessels and protected by a strong squadron. He was really assisted by
the English and Dutch navies, but the expedition was not for that reason
the less remarkable in the details of the disembarkation. The same
prince effected a descent into Livonia to aid Narva, but he landed his
troops at a Swedish port.

Peter the Great, having some cause of complaint against the Persians,
and wishing to take advantage of their dissensions, embarked (in 1722)
upon the Volga: he entered the Caspian Sea with two hundred and seventy
vessels, carrying twenty thousand foot-soldiers, and descended to
Agrakhan, at the mouths of the Koisou, where he expected to meet his
cavalry. This force, numbering nine thousand dragoons and five thousand
Cossacks, joined him after a land-march by way of the Caucasus. The czar
then seized Derbent, besieged Bakou, and finally made a treaty with one
of the parties whose dissensions at that time filled with discord the
empire of the Soofees: he procured the cession of Astrabad, the key of
the Caspian Sea and, in some measure, of the whole Persian empire.

The time of Louis XV. furnished examples of none but secondary
expeditions, unless we except that of Richelieu against Minorca, which
was very glorious as an escalade, but less extraordinary as a descent.

[In 1762, an English fleet sailed from Portsmouth: this was joined by a
portion of the squadron from Martinico. The whole amounted to nineteen
ships of the line, eighteen smaller vessels of war, and one hundred and
fifty transports, carrying ten thousand men. The expedition besieged and
captured Havana.--TRS.]

The Spaniards, however, in 1775, made a descent with fifteen or sixteen
thousand men upon Algiers, with a view of punishing tho