ssel, in the construction of
which so much time and money had been consumed, had at last been set
afloat. She had been called the War's End, and, so far as Antwerp was
concerned, the fates that presided over her birth seemed to have been
paltering in a double sense when the ominous name was conferred. She was
larger than anything previously known in naval architecture; she had four
masts and three helms. Her bulwarks were ten feet thick; her tops were
musket-proof. She had twenty guns of largest size, besides many other
pieces of artillery of lesser calibre, the lower tier of which was almost
at the water's level. She was to carry one thousand men, and she was so
supported on corks and barrels as to be sure to float under any
circumstances. Thus she was a great swimming fortress which could not be
sunk, and was impervious to shot. Unluckily, however, in spite of her
four masts and three helms, she would neither sail nor steer, and she
proved but a great, unmanageable and very ridiculous tub, fully
justifying all the sarcasms that had been launched upon her during the
period of her construction, which had been almost as long as the siege
itself.

The Spaniards called her the Bugaboo--a monster to scare children withal.
The patriots christened her the Elephant, the Antwerp Folly, the Lost
Penny, with many similar appellations. A small army might have been
maintained for a month, they said, on the money she had cost, or the
whole city kept in bread for three months. At last, late in May, a few
days before the battle of the Kowenstyn, she set forth from Antwerp,
across the submerged land, upon her expedition to sweep all the Spanish
forts out of existence, and to bring the war to its end. She came to her
own end very briefly, for, after drifting helplessly about for an hour,
she stuck fast in the sand in the neighbourhood of Ordam, while the crew
and soldiers made their escape, and came back to the city to share in the
ridicule which, from first to last, had attached itself to the
monster-ship.

Two days after the Kowenstyn affair, Alexander sent an expedition under
Count Charles Mansfeld to take possession of the great Bugaboo. The boat,
in which were Count Charles, Count Aremberg, his brother de Barbancon,
and other noble volunteers, met with an accident: a keg of gun powder
accidentally exploding, blowing Aremberg into the water, whence he
escaped unharmed by swimming, and frightfully damaging Mansfeld in the
face. Thi