Page:The invasion of the Crimea Vol. 9.djvu/77

 THE RENEWED EXPEDITION TO KEBTCH. 47 to the numbers of eager seamen collected on chap. board the two fleets. Eear- Admiral Wulff, the same day, burnt down The fate . i of the other vessels belonging to his unhappy squadron, squadron, and went on with the work of destruction till out of the fourteen vessels which had composed it there remained, it seems, only four. The four vessels preserved were all of them, however, war- steamers, and comparatively powerful. "With these, at 7 o'clock in the evening, Bear- Admiral "Wilis' moved out through the Straits, and got off into the Sea of Azof ; but the escape, if so one may call it, brought, after all, only a respite soon followed by utter destruction.* The Allied navies toiled all night long at the The Allied navies; work of landing not only men, but horses, guns, their opera stores of all kinds, and had hardly completed tlons - their task, when at 4 o'clock on the morning of the 25th, Captain Lyons of the Miranda de- spatched Mr George Williams, the master of the ship, with orders to endeavour to find and buoy a channel through the Straits. This service the channel ., . into the skilled, fearless officer achieved in the ships gig Azof found ' . and buoyed and cutter under fire from the Russian battery still left on the Cheska Spit, 'and between ex- ' ploding and burning vessels which had been ' sunk in the fairway and set on fire by the ' enemy.' By the channel thus found, Mr George Williams passed through the Straits, and was the first officer of the Allied forces to enter the Sea
 * See post, p. 63, and pp. 65, 66.