ere toiling day and night to prepare the defence of their capital.
But prim Sir Hyde anchored, and sent up a single frigate with his
ultimatum, and it was not until March 30 that the British fleet, a long
line of stately vessels, came sailing up the Sound, passed Elsinore,
and cast anchor fifteen miles from Copenhagen. Nothing could surpass
the gallant energy shown by the Danes in their preparation for defence,
and Nature had done much to make the city impregnable from the sea.

[Illustration: The Battle of the Baltic, April 2nd, 1801. From
Brenton's Naval History.]

The Sound is narrow and shallow, a mere tangle of shoals wrinkled with
twisted channels and scoured by the swift tides. King's Channel runs
straight up towards the city, but a huge sandbank, like the point of a
toe, splits the channel into two just as it reaches the harbour. The
western edge runs up, pocket-shaped, into the city, and forms the
actual port; the main channel contracts, swings round to the
south-east, and forms a narrow passage between the shallows in front of
the city and a huge shoal called the Middle Ground. A cluster of grim
and heavily armed fortifications called the Three-Crown Batteries
guarded the entrance to the harbour, and looked right up King's
Channel; a stretch of floating batteries and line-of-battle ships, a
mile and a half in extent, ran from the Three-Crown Batteries along the
edge of the shoals in front of the city, with some heavy pile batteries
at its termination. The direct approach up King's Channel, together
with the narrow passage between the city and the Middle Ground, were
thus commanded by the fire of over 600 heavy guns. The Danes had
removed the buoys that marked all the channels, the British had no
charts, and only the most daring and skilful seamanship could bring the
great ships of the British fleet through that treacherous tangle of
shoals to the Danish front. As a matter of fact, the heavier ships in
the British fleet never attempted to join in the desperate fight which
was waged, but hung as mere spectators in the offing.

Meanwhile popular enthusiasm in the Danish capital was at fever-point.
Ten thousand disciplined troops manned the batteries; but peasants from
the farms, workmen from the factories, merchants from the city,
hastened to volunteer, and worked day and night at gun-drill. A
thousand students from the university enrolled themselves, and drilled
from morning till night. These student