A Danish ship, whose crew were ignorant of this state of affairs at the mouth of the river, ran between the mainland and the island. Α shot from the latter made her shorten sail; she was compelled to come close to the rock, and was sacked of all she contained, though Britain was then at peace with Denmark. After this, as if to complete the exasperation of the Council, when the winter nights were dark and long, the little garrison made boating expeditions along the coast on both sides, "and laid all between the Tyne and the Tay under contribution," and brought off many a cask of beer and runlet of wine, in which to drink to the confusion of King William, and to the health of King James VII., while the Government at Edinburgh found itself helpless !

The distance between the island and the mainland of East Lothian was too far for the cannon of those days to be of any avail; and its cliff-built battlements were too high to be reached by the artillery of any ship, unless she were heeled over to a degree that would be dangerous; while the guns of the castle were of heavy calibre, and well supplied with shot and shell, and were moreover in the hands of desperate men who knew well how to use them, and who were fighting with halters round their necks.

Though the blockading detachments never thought of attempting to storm a place where cold shot, simply dropped from the hand, might dash their boats to pieces, an essay was made to cut off the two boats of the petty garrison. One of these they usually drew up to the ramparts by means of their powerful crane, part of which is still lying there; and the other was the boat taken by Ardmillan, which was capable of holding twenty men. This they deemed secure enough when drawn up high and dry on the plateau of rock beneath the loopholed spur; but one dark night, nine adventurous infantrymen from Castleton landed quietly and unseen, crept up the chasm, launched the boat, and towed it to the opposite shore. This loss was a severe one; but Middleton and Ardmillan landed soon after in the skiff, near the ruins of Tantallan, promising to return in a fortnight, at latest, with provisions.

All means of communicating with the mainland were thus cut off, by the capture of one boat and the absence of the other. Provisions were growing scanty. Two weeks expired; a few more days passed, and still there was no appearance of succour, and doubtless the sea-birds had long since palled upon them as food. Myriads of these

A quaint old English naturalist, writing in 1651, describes it as it is at the present hour. "The surface is almost wholly covered during the months of May and June with nests, eggs, and young birds, so that it is scarcely possible to walk without treading on them; and their noise is such that you cannot without difficulty hear your next neighbour's voice. If you look down upon the sea from the top of the precipice, you will see it on every side covered with infinite numbers of birds of different kinds, swimming and hunting for their prey. If in sailing round the island you survey the overhanging cliffs, you see on every crag and in every fissure innumerable birds of various sorts and sizes, more than the stars of heaven when viewed in a serene night. If from afar you see the distant flocks, either flying to or from the island, you would imagine them to be a swarm of bees."

Despite the quantity of birds about them, Captain Maitland and his ten comrades were beginning to lose courage. He made a signal to the officer at Castleton for a boat, and sent off Ensign Dunbar to confer about a capitulation; but ere the arrangements were complete, a large barge with her sails set was seen to run in between the mainland and the Bass, under the guns of which it brought to safely, ere the guns from the shore or those of the armed ships could intercept her. Cannon were now fired in defiance, and in token that the hostilities were resumed; but the luckless Ensign Dunbar was detained as a prisoner and traitor. Five days after this a patrol contrived to seize the same boat when she was leaving the isle in the night; and there were found in her four sailors, four women, Swan the gunner, and the Foot Guardsman who had been retained when the castle was surprised.

Sixteen men were now the force of the little garrison. They had thirteen sheep, two hundredweight of biscuit, fifteen bolls of oatmeal, two barrels of butter, peas, salt, coals, candles, hard fish, and salt junk in plenty, and a great hogshead of brandy found in the Danish ship. In the centre of the isle is a good spring of the purest water. They had fourteen iron cannon, sixty stand of snaphance muskets, ten casks of gunpowder, plenty of ball cartridge, and 400 cannon balls, most of which had been fired into the island. this ammunition they stored in the little chapel of St. Baldred, and in the oratory in which history and tradition alike record he lived and died.

All

Bass Rock.]

A whole year had passed away, and still these brave adventurers, within sight of the city of Edinburgh, in their castle secure as the eyrie of the eagle, defied all the efforts of two governments to subdue them.

In the March of 1692, the Lords of the Admiralty sent orders to Captain Anthony Roope, commander of the ship Sheerness, lying in Leith Roads, and to Captain Orton, of the London Merchant, to attack the Bass immediately. According to a MS. History of the Bass in North Berwick House (quoted by Crichton), their instructions were "to do it what prejudice they could, by breaking the crane, dismounting the cannon, and ruining what houses were upon it."

In all this, however, the Sheerness, a fifth-rate, and her consort, signally failed; and also could not prevent the garrison from doubling their store of powder, taking all the wheat and barley out of certain sloops going to Dunbar, carrying away all the coals from the lighthouse on the Isle of May, and actually seizing a large pinnace in the harbour of Dundee, nearly forty miles distant!

A fifty-gun ship, the Lion, commanded by Captain Edmund Burd, assisted by a large armed pinnace of Kirkaldy, under a Captain Boswell, and a dogger of six guns, failed to reduce the island either; and on the sudden appearance of a French frigate, they either put to sea or fled up the river. This was in August, 1693, when some Jacobites in France, having heard of this singularly protracted resistance, sent the frigate to the island with supplies.

A heavily-armed frigate and a large launch were now ordered by the Scottish Ministry to cruise constantly near the Bass. A man named Trotter, who had been in the habit of secretly supplying the little garrison, fell into the hands of the authorities; and the land blockade was entrusted to Thomas Drury, chief of the Scots Engineers, whose drawing of the castle in its original state is published in Blackadder's Memoirs.

The beginning of 1694 saw the possessors of the Bass reduced to the verge of starvation; and in April, Lieutenant Middleton, who now conducted the defence, hoisted a white flag, and made proposals of capitulation.

Certain articles were drawn up, and placed in the hands of a major named Reid, who, with some other officers went off to the Bass. They found the long-secluded defenders of the rock in remarkably high spirits. Middleton gave them luncheon, with plenty of the best of French wine; and on their departure, the forlorn band gave them three hearty cheers, and the walls were lined with

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stuffed figures in red coats and old regimental beaver hats.

The terms on which they insisted, and which were granted, were, that they should march out with the honours of war, with baggage and arms, and land where they pleased in their own boats; that all, if they chose, should be landed free in France, and that those who cared not to go might remain in Scotland without molestation. They were to sell and appropriate all they had amassed, and the four years' back pay of all the officers was to be paid by the Exchequer; all of which was done, and on the 20th of April, 1694, the little garrison marched out by the east gate, and put off in their boats, and on the 30th the cannon were removed from the rock. In its soil many traces of this singular siege are found from time to time, in the shape of cannon-shot and fragments of exploded bombs half buried in the turf.

Crawford of Ardmillan remained at home, and married Margaret Kennedy of Balderstone; but owing to the hardships he had undergone on the Bass Rock he died soon after. Captain Charles Maitland was presented to King William in Flanders, where he offered him a commission, which he declined.

David Blair joined King James in France, where he died an exile; but his mother survived him long, and died at Ardblair, in Perthshire, in ninety-seventh year, in 1752, after her having been, as her obituary records, "married fifty years and twenty-eight a widow."

Captain Maitland was succeeded as captain of the Bass by Fletcher of Saltoun, the same fiery individual who, as we have related in our sixtysixth chapter, pistolled Dare, the Mayor of Lyme Regis. The island now belongs to the Laird of North Berwick, who pays to the crown therefore an annual fee of one penny Scots, with a yearly tribute of seven solan geese to the minister on the mainland.

The castle contained accommodation for a hundred soldiers and sixty prisoners. The ruins of these buildings are still very entire; but the chapel

the last edifice consecrated in Scotland before the Reformation-is roofless. It was from this island fortress that the Earl of Carrick (son of Robert III.), afterwards James I., embarked in 1405 for France, that he might pursue his studies in safety from the intrigues of his uncle Albany.

In the time of the Great Civil Wars, Lauder of the Bass was a distinguished Royalist; and it is a daughter of his whose name is identified with the "Maggie Lauder" of the well-known Scottish song.

About dawn on the 30th of June, that year, great crowds of people on the Sussex coast resorted to Beachy Head, the loftiest cliff on that part of the shore. It is 573 feet high, and perforated by many caverns-the scene of many a shipwreck in stormy weather, and the resort of multitudes of sea-fowl. On that morning the French fleet, under Anne Hilarion de Costentin, the Count de Tourville, consisting of seventy-eight men-of-war and twenty-two fire-ships, was seen hovering off the coast, and ere long the allied English and Dutch fleets, the former consisting of thirty-four sail and the latter of twenty-two, under the Earl of Torrington, hove in sight. De Tourville was made a Marshal of France in 1693.

powerful fleet had long menaced the Channel coast, while nor far from that of France-but a little way inland indeed-a considerable army was cantoned, under the orders of a celebrated marshal, Louis de Crevant, Duc d'Humieres, waiting to embark for England; and the defeat of Torrington might bring 20,000 French veterans on the sands at Deal, at a time when the whole united forces in Britain did not exceed 10,000 men.

Hence it was with no small anxiety the good folks of Sussex on that June morning assembled on the chalky crest of Beachy Head, and turned their eyes and telescopes seaward.

Aware of how much depended on the issue of a battle, Admiral Torrington had been loth to risk it.

He had wavered for some time, till discontent became audible in London; and at length peremptory orders were given him to fight the French at all hazards, and these orders reached him when he was drawing near Beachy Head.

The Earl of Torrington was a man of undoubted bravery, whose whole life had been passed face to face with death and danger; but that he shrunk nervously from the terrible responsibility incurred by encountering a hundred sail with only fifty-six,

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Ashley, with Rear-Admiral Sir Cloudesley Shove!, led the Blue squadron.

The French fleet was formed in three divisions. The van was led by Jean, the Count d'Estrées and de Tourbes, Marshal of France, in La Grande, 86 guns, with twenty-six sail (a Dutch account says it was led by M. de Chateau Reynaud, Marquis and Marshal of France in 1693); the centre by the Count de Tourville, in the Royal Sun, 100 guns, with twenty-six sail; the rear by Admiral d'Amfre

He conceived the idea of letting a portion of his fleet skirmish with the enemy while the main body, should not if possible engage; thus he formed his order of battle so that the heaviest brunt of the action should fall upon the Dutch, already in disfavour in England, so much so that the destruction of their whole fleet would have caused less murmuring there than the loss of one of our smallest frigates.

With these views and plans he stood towards the enemy. George Rooke was vice-admiral, and led the Red squadron. Admiral Russell and Sir John

sail. Their fire-ships hovered on the flanks.

The original intention of the French was, if possible, to divide their fleet, of which one part was to stand up the Thames, while the Jacobites in London rose in arms and seized the Queen and her Ministry; the other portion was to join their galleys and land troops at Torbay; while a squadron in the Irish Sea cut off King William's return from Ireland. But now the approach of Torrington put all the future to the event of a battle.

The French had actually been so close in on the coast that on the 21st of June their boats had taken some loiterers on board. These were handled pretty roughly, and then set on shore.

anchor.

When the signal to close in action was hoisted by the Earl of Torrington, the French were under easy sail upon a wind, with their heads lying northwards, off Beachy Head; but on seeing the English forming line," they braced their head-sails to the mast and lay by ;" and at nine o'clock a few puffs of snow-white smoke upon the sea announced to the crowds upon the headland and those away by Eastbourne that the battle had begun.

Promptly did the Dutch, who were in the van, under Admiral Calembourg, respond to the signal, seconded by the English Blue squadron, under Sir Cloudesley Shovel; but the Red, or centre squadron, being, by Torrington's intention, kept somewhat apart, left a great opening, of which the French hastened to take advantage, to surround Shovel and the Dutch.

Père Daniel says that on this day the French had the advantage both of the wind and tide.

Evertzen and his countrymen fought with the most stubborn bravery; and, in spite of national prejudice, it was fully admitted by the English and French that "in none of Van Tromp's or De Ruyter's battles had the honour of the Batavian flag been more gallantly upheld." Two of their rear-admirals, Dick and Brackel, with many captains and seamen, were slain; a vast number of wounded, horribly mutilated by round and chain-shot, encumbered all the decks and lay about the guns, and their hulls and rigging were battered and torn to pieces in a manner they could not have been had they been properly seconded by Lord Torrington.

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The Dutch began the fight," records Burchett, as also did some of the English; but not being seconded by the rest of the fleet, which unexpectedly stood away, several of the Dutch ships, after they had fought most gallantly, were either burnt, sunk, or disabled, and the English that engaged were very much shattered.

During many hours the van, with the Blue squadron, in which Captain Sir David Mitchell, in the Elizabeth, 70 guns, greatly distinguished himself, maintained the unequal contest without adequate assistance from the other part of the At length the Dutch drew off, leaving one shattered hull in the hands of the enemy; and to

On examining the state of his fleet, the Earl of Torrington found the ships of the Blue squadron had suffered considerably, and came to the conclusion that no advantage could be won by a renewal of the action.

By five in the afternoon the wind died away, and he came to anchor; while several of the French ships, with their boats ahead, were being towed out of range of cannon-shot. In the night the English fleet weighed anchor, and stood eastward. Next day Torrington called a Council of War, which decided that it was most advisable to preserve the fleet by retreating, and to destroy all disabled ships, rather than lose time by protecting them.

This was accordingly done. Many Dutch ships were scuttled and sunk; the rest were taken in tow by the English fleet, which sailed along the Kentish coast with all speed for the Thames. In this unfortunate battle their loss was two captains, Botham and Pomeroy, with two captains of marines in Torrington's own regiment, and 330 men.

Such is the account given in Torrington's own dispatch, dated, "Off Beachy, July 1st, one in the afternoon," in "Dalrymple's Annals."

The French were still pursuing; when off Rye Bay, in sight of the ancient town-one of the famous old Cinque Ports-the people had the mortification to see an English ship, the Anne, 70 guns, which was entirely dismasted, forced on shore by the enemy, and set in flames. Captain John Tyrrel, her commander, who had fought her gallantly, escaped.

They next attempted to destroy a Dutch sixtyfour gun ship, as she lay half-aground near Pevensey; but Puffendorf says her captain defended her so resolutely that they were compelled to relinquish the attempt; that three others were burnt by their own crews, and that the total loss of the Dutch was six first-rate men-of-war. But more than ali did they deplore the deaths of Jan Dick and Brackel, Admirals of the Maese and North Holland. Père Daniel states that the largest Dutch ship was taken by the Marquis de Nesmonde.

Torrington sought refuge in the Thames, where he ordered all the buoys to be torn up, which made the navigation of the river so dangerous that he could not be followed by the Count de Tourville, who came to anchor in Torbay; but great were the terror and consternation in London. There, we are told, "the shame was insupportable, the peril imminent. What if the victorious enemy should do what De Ruyter had done?