The Admiral: A Romance of Nelson in the Year of the Nile

by Douglas Brooke Wheelton Sladen

Chapter V.—In which Will has his first Chance, and his first Escapade, and his first Meeting with the Princess of Favara.

I SHOULD have said that ten minutes before the barge left, the Admiral hailed me.

“Go and make yourself ready, Trinder. Mr. Hardres must not steer the barge now.”

And so I went with him. But though I was his particular mate, and never away from him for five minutes when he was not with the Admiral, he took no more account of me than any common seaman. He seemed wrapt up in his mission, and I saw that he had the Admiral’s great quality of not letting an opportunity pass.

When we reached the long landing steps under the Marina, we were met by a ragged rabble of a guard under an officer who spoke French. Now, I knew a very little of French, and could make out that Will demanded to be taken at once into the presence of the Governor, with myself and his guard.

“Oui, Monsieur the Vice-Admiral,” said the officer with the greatest possible alacrity.

Like every one else in the city, he was bursting to know the reason of the advent of this formidable fleet. England was at peace with the Two Sicilies, he knew. So, for the matter of that, was France; though all the time his King, and, what was more to the point, his Queen, were dying to cut the throat of every Frenchman, and ready to declare war the moment they could get sufficient protection from the Allies. In the state of confusion Europe was then in no one would have been surprised at any of the belligerents seizing any point of vantage they happened to require, in the territories of the feeble principalities of Italy. The townspeople, mad with delight, imagined that this fine fleet had come to occupy Syracuse, and defend it against the dreaded operations of the French. So delighted were they to see us, that the Governor wrote afterwards to Sir John Acton, that they would have carried the ships one by one to their houses, if it had been possible. And in any case resistance would have been impossible. For centuries it had been the cardinal belief that no large ship could cross the bar at the entrance to the Great Port. Consequently, the inner face of the city all along the Marina was hardly fortified; certainly not in a state to resist any kind of naval attack more formidable than an assault by boats. A frigate could have defied the landward guns of the Castle, and laid the town in ashes. If the Syracusans had not been too ignorant to know anything about the political questions with which Europe was boiling, they might have thought that the English had come there to seize the town, because the Two Sicilies had not declared war upon the French. That the town was about to be seized upon some pretext or other, they felt certain; else why this imposing force—the greatest expedition which had ever come to the city since the famous siege by the Athenians? And the Athenians, God bless them, came before the days of gunpowder.

The officer, forming his ragged troops in some sort of order, led the way to the ancient castello, built by the Greek, Georgio Maniace, when he reconquered Syracuse from the Arabs, before the Norman conquest. A lovely, but rather tumbledown black-and-white marble gateway had been built by him to support the two famous bronze rams, made by ancient Greeks in classical times. Seven hundred and seventy years afterwards the gate and its rams were still there to give our entry becoming state. The rams were really very comical, and I had it just on my lips, when I caught Will’s hard blue eye, and brought my face to attention. Nor was that the only comical thing about the castle, which was so little used that a fine crop of dwarf stocks were growing right up to the guns.

The Governor, Don Giuseppe delle Torre, had chosen rather an al fresco scene for the reception.

To be brief, he had had a space cleared among the powder and shot and flour barrels in the deep bomb-proof vaults, which are a feature of fortresses in these parts. There was hardly any light, and there were only three chairs, two of which he hastily assigned to us. I noticed that a bed, with very fine but much-worn Spanish hangings, was being erected in one corner; and I wondered if, as the next move, he would not have the powder taken out and thrown into the sea. In which he would have shown his wisdom, as the castle could not possibly have made any resistance to our fleet, and it might have blown up if a chance shot had found its way into the magazine.