ot Lord Gambier let us do it?" Lord Gambier, who had fallen into
a sort of gentle and pious melancholy, was really more occupied in
distributing tracts among his crews than in trying to reach his
enemies; and Harvey, his second in command, an old Trafalgar sea-dog,
when Cochrane arrived with his commission, interviewed his admiral,
denounced him in a white-heat on his own quarter-deck, and ended by
telling him that "if Nelson had been there he would not have anchored
in the Basque Roads at all, but would have dashed at the enemy at
once." This outburst, no doubt, relieved Admiral Harvey's feelings,
but it cost him his flag, and he was court-martialled, and dismissed
from the service for the performance.

Cochrane, however, set himself with characteristic daring and coolness
to carry out his task. The French fleet consisted of one huge ship of
120 guns, two of 80 guns, eight seventy-fours, a 50-gun ship, and two
40-gun frigates--fourteen ships in all. It was drawn up in two lines
under the shelter of powerful shore batteries, with the frigates as
out-guards. As a protection against fire-ships, a gigantic boom had
been constructed half a mile in length, forming two sides of a
triangle, with the apex towards the British fleet. Over this huge
floating barrier powerful boat squadrons kept watch every night.
Cochrane's plan of attack was marked by real genius. He constructed
three explosion vessels, floating mines on the largest scale. Each of
these terrific vessels contained no less than _fifteen hundred_ barrels
of gunpowder, bound together with cables, with wedges and moistened
sand rammed down betwixt them; forming, in brief, one gigantic bomb,
with 1500 barrels of gunpowder for its charge. On the top of this huge
powder magazine was piled, as a sort of agreeable condiment, hundreds
of live shells and thousands of hand grenades; the whole, by every form
of marine ingenuity, compacted into a solid mass which, at the touch of
a fuse, could be turned into a sort of floating Vesuvius. These were
to be followed by a squadron of fire-ships. Cochrane who, better,
perhaps, than any soldier or sailor that ever lived, knew how to strike
at his foes through their own imagination, calculated that when these
three huge explosion vessels, with twenty fire-ships behind them, went
off in a sort of saltpetre earthquake, the astonished Frenchmen would
imagine _every_ fire-ship to be a floating mine, and, instead of trying
to boa