of
any kind whatever were afterwards employed on that service. A third sort
swore, that no other cause could be assigned for this undertaking than
that which induced Don Quixote to attack the windmill. A fourth class
(and that the most numerous, though, without doubt, composed of the
sanguine and malicious), plainly taxed this commander with want of
honesty as well as sense; and alleged that he ought to have sacrificed
private pique to the interest of his country; that, where the lives of
so many brave fellow-citizens were concerned, he ought to have concurred
with the general without being solicited or even desired, towards their
preservation and advantage, that, if his arguments could not dissuade
him from a desperate enterprise, it was his duty to have rendered it as
practicable as possible, without running extreme hazard; that this could
have been done, with a good prospect of success, by ordering five or
six large ships to batter the town, while the land forces stormed the
castle; by these means a considerable diversion would have been made in
favour of those troops, who, in their march to the assault and in the
retreat, suffered much more from the town than from the castle! that the
inhabitants, seeing themselves vigorously attacked on all hands, would
have been divided, distracted, and confused, and in all probability,
unable to resist the assailants. But all these suggestions surely
proceeded from ignorance or malevolence, or else the admiral would not
have found it such an easy matter, at his return to England, to justify
his conduct to a ministry at once so upright and discerning. True it is,
that those who undertook to vindicate him on the spot, asserted, that
there was not water enough for our great ships near the town: though
this was a little unfortunately urged, because there happened to be
pilots in the fleet perfectly well acquainted with the soundings of the
harbour, who affirmed there was water enough for five eighty-gun ships
to lie abreast almost up to the very walls. The disappointments
we suffered occasioned a universal dejection, which was not at all
alleviated by the objects that daily and hourly entertained our eyes,
nor by the prospect of what must have inevitably happened, had we
remained much longer in this place. Such was the economy in some
ships that, rather than be at the trouble of interring the dead, their
commanders ordered their men to throw their bodies overboard, many
without eithe