GREYTOWN (San Juan del Norte), the principal seaport on the Caribbean coast of Nicaragua, in the extreme south-eastern corner of the republic, and at the mouth of the northern channel of the San Juan river delta. Pop. (1905) about 2500. The town occupies the seaward side of a narrow peninsula, formed by the windings of the river. Most of its houses are raised on piles 2 or 3 ft. above the ground. The neighbourhood is unhealthy and unsuited for agriculture, so that almost all food-stuffs must be imported, and the cost of living is high. Greytown has suffered severely from the accumulation of sand in its once fine harbour. Between 1832 and 1848 Point Arenas, the seaward end of the peninsula, was enlarged by a sandbank more than 1 m. long; between 1850 and 1875 the depth of water over the bar decreased from about 25 ft. to 5 ft., and the entrance channel, which had been nearly ½ m. wide, was almost closed. Subsequent attempts to improve the harbour by dredging and building jetties have only had partial success; but Greytown remains the headquarters of Nicaraguan commerce with Europe and eastern America. The village called America, 1 m. N., was built as the eastern terminus of a proposed interoceanic canal.
The harbour of San Juan, discovered by Columbus, was brought into further notice by Captain Diego Machuca, who in 1529 sailed down the river from Lake Nicaragua. The date of the first Spanish settlement on the spot is not known, but in the 17th century there were fortifications at the mouth of the river. In 1796 San Juan was made a port of entry by royal charter, and new defences were erected in 1821. In virtue of the protectorate claimed by Great Britain over the Mosquito Coast (q.v.), the Mosquito Indians, aided by a British force, seized the town in 1848 and occupied it until 1860, when Great Britain ceded its protectorate to Nicaragua by the treaty of Managua. This treaty secured religious liberty and trial by jury for all civil and criminal charges in Greytown; its seventh article declared the port free, but was never enforced.
GREYWACKE, or Grauwacke (a German word signifying a grey earthy rock), the designation, formerly more generally used by English geologists than at the present day, for impure, highly composite, gritty rocks belonging to the Palaeozoic systems. They correspond to the sandstones, grits and fine conglomerates of the later periods. Greywackes are mostly grey, brown, yellow or black, dull-coloured, sandy rocks which may occur in thick or thin beds along with slates, limestones, &c., and are abundant in Wales, the south of Scotland and the Lake district of England. They contain a very great variety of minerals, of which the principal are quartz, orthoclase and plagioclase, calcite, iron oxides and graphitic carbonaceous matters, together with (in the coarser kinds) fragments of such rocks as felsite, chert, slate, gneiss, various schists, quartzite. Among other minerals found in them are biotite and chlorite, tourmaline, epidote, apatite, garnet, hornblende and augite, sphene, pyrites. The cementing material may be siliceous or argillaceous, and is sometimes calcareous. As a rule greywackes are not fossiliferous, but organic remains may be common in the finer beds associated with them. Their component particles are usually not much rounded by attrition, and the rocks have often been considerably indurated by pressure and mineral changes, such as the introduction of interstitial silica. In some districts the greywackes are cleaved, but they show phenomena of this kind much less perfectly than the slates. Although the group is so diverse that it is difficult to characterize mineralogically, it has a well-established place in petrographical classifications, because these peculiar composite arenaceous deposits are very frequent among Silurian and Cambrian rocks, and rarely occur in Secondary or Tertiary systems. Their essential features are their gritty character and their complex composition. By increasing metamorphism greywackes frequently pass into mica-schists, chloride schists and sedimentary gneisses.
(J. S. F.)
GRIBEAUVAL, JEAN BAPTISTE DE (1715-1789), French artillery general, was the son of a magistrate of Amiens and was born there on the 15th of September 1715. He entered the French royal artillery in 1732 as a volunteer, and became an officer in 1735. For nearly twenty years regimental duty and scientific work occupied him, and in 1752 he became captain of a company of miners. A few years later he was employed in a military mission in Prussia. In 1757, being then a lieutenant-colonel, he was lent to the Austrian army on the outbreak of the Seven Years’ War, and served as a general officer of artillery. The siege of Glatz and the defence of Schweidnitz were his principal exploits. The empress Maria Theresa rewarded him for his work with the rank of lieutenant field-marshal and the cross of the Maria Theresa order. On his return to France he was made maréchal de camp, in 1764 inspector of artillery, and in 1765 lieutenant-general and commander of the order of St Louis. For some years after this he was in disfavour at court, and he became first inspector of artillery only in 1776, in which year also he received the grand cross of the St Louis order. He was now able to carry out the reforms in the artillery arm which are his chief title to fame. See [Artillery]; and for full details Gribeauval’s own Table des constructions des principaux attirails de l’artillerie ... de M. de Gribeauval, and the règlement for the French artillery issued in 1776. He died in 1789.
See Puységur in Journal de Paris, supplement of the 8th of July 1789; Chevalier de Passac, Précis sur M. de Gribeauval (Paris, 1816); Veyrines, Gribeauval (Paris, 1889), and Hennébert, Gribeauval, lieutenant-général des armées du roy (Paris, 1896).
GRIBOYEDOV, ALEXANDER SERGUEEVICH (1795-1829), Russian dramatic author, was born in 1795 at Moscow, where he studied at the university from 1810 to 1812. He then obtained a commission in a hussar regiment, but resigned it in 1816. Next year he entered the civil service, and in 1818 was appointed secretary of the Russian legation in Persia, whence he was transferred to Georgia. He had commenced writing early, and had produced on the stage at St Petersburg in 1816 a comedy in verse, translated from the French, called The Young Spouses, which was followed by other pieces of the same kind. But neither these nor the essays and verses which he wrote would have been long remembered but for the immense success gained by his comedy in verse, Goré ot uma, or “Misfortune from Intelligence” (Eng. trans. by N. Benardaky, 1857). A satire upon Russian society, or, as a high official styled it, “A pasquinade on Moscow,” its plot is slight, its merits consisting in its accurate representation of certain social and official types—such as Famousoff, the lover of old abuses, the hater of reforms; his secretary, Molchanin, servile fawner upon all in office; the aristocratic young liberal and Anglomaniac, Repetiloff; contrasted with whom is the hero of the piece, Tchatsky, the ironical satirist, just returned from the west of Europe, who exposes and ridicules the weaknesses of the rest, his words echoing that outcry of the young generation of 1820 which reached its climax in the military insurrection of 1825, and was then sternly silenced by Nicholas. Griboyedov spent the summer of 1823 in Russia, completed his play and took it to St Petersburg. There it was rejected by the censorship. Many copies were made and privately circulated, but Griboyedov never saw it published. The first edition was printed in 1833, four years after his death. Only once did he see it on the stage, when it was acted by the officers of the garrison at Erivan. Soured by disappointment he returned to Georgia, made himself useful by his linguistic knowledge to his relative Count Paskievitch-Erivansky during a campaign against Persia, and was sent to St Petersburg with the treaty of 1828. Brilliantly received there, he thought of devoting himself to literature, and commenced a romantic drama, A Georgian Night. But he was suddenly sent to Persia as minister-plenipotentiary. Soon after his arrival at Teheran a tumult arose, caused by the anger of the populace against some Georgian and Armenian captives—Russian subjects—who had taken refuge in the Russian embassy. It was stormed, Griboyedov was killed (February 11, 1829), and his body was for three days so ill-treated by the mob that it was at last recognized only by an old scar on the hand, due to a wound received in a duel. It was taken to Tiflis, and buried in the monastery of St David. There a monument was erected to his memory by his widow, to whom he had been but a few months married.