Page:Royal Naval Biography Marshall v1p1.djvu/324

294 and absorbed almost the whole naval means of the combined squadrons. It was at this anxious moment he volunteered his services to burn the French fleet, magazines, &c., a service generally considered as impracticable, with the slender means by which it was to be attempted, but which he executed in a manner that justified his appointment to so arduous a task; ten ships of the line, and several frigates in the arsenal and inner harbour, with the mast-house, great store-house, hemphouse, and other buildings, being completely destroyed.

Sir W. Sidney Smith, and the officers immediately under his orders, surrounded by a tremendous conflagration, had nearly completed the hazardous services assigned to them, when the loud shouts, and the republican songs of the approaching enemy, were heard at intervals amid the bursting of shells and firing of musketry. In addition to the horror of such a scene, and which, for some minutes, had the good effect of checking the career, and arresting in awful contemplation the mind of a vindictive enemy, the dreadful explosion of many thousand barrels of gunpowder on board the Iris frigate, in the Inner Road, will ever be remembered by those who were witnesses of the scene. The concussion it produced shook the houses in Toulon like an earthquake, and occasioned the sudden crash of every window in them; whilst the scattered fragments of burning timber, which had been blown up, descending with considerable force, threatened the destruction of all the officers and men who were near the spot. Fortunately, however, only three of the party lost their lives on the occasion. This powder-ship had been set on fire by the Spaniards, instead of scuttling and sinking her, as had been previously concerted. Sir W. Sidney Smith having completed the destruction of every thing within his reach, to his astonishment first discovered that our perfidious allies had not set fire to any of the ships in the basin before the town; he therefore hastened thither with the boats under his command, for the purpose of endeavouring to counteract the treachery of the Spaniards; when lo! to his great mortification, he found the boom at the entrance laid across, and was obliged to desist in his attempts to cut it, from the repeated vollies of musketry directed towards his boats from the flagship, and the wall of the Battery Royale. He therefore 