steaming through water smooth as glass. You glance, again, running
down the coast of Martinique, into a deep bay, ringed round with gay
houses embowered in mango and coconut, with the Piton du Vauclain
rising into the clouds behind it. That is the Cul-de-sac Royal, for
years the rendezvous and stronghold of the French fleets. From it
Count de Grasse sailed out on the fatal 8th of April; and there,
beyond it, opens an isolated rock, of the shape, but double the
size, of one of the great Pyramids, which was once the British sloop
of war Diamond Rock.

For, in the end of 1803, Sir Samuel Hood saw that French ships
passing to Fort Royal harbour in Martinique escaped him by running
through the deep channel between Pointe du Diamante and this same
rock, which rises sheer out of the water 600 feet, and is about a
mile round, and only accessible at a point to the leeward, and even
then only when there is no surf. He who lands, it is said, has then
to creep through crannies and dangerous steeps, round to the
windward side, where the eye is suddenly relieved by a sloping grove
of wild fig-trees, clinging by innumerable air-roots to the cracks
of the stone.

So Hood, with that inspiration of genius so common then among
sailors, laid his seventy-four, the Centaur, close alongside the
Diamond; made a hawser, with a traveller on it, fast to the ship and
to the top of the rock; and in January 1804 got three long 24's and
two 18's hauled up far above his masthead by sailors who, as they
'hung like clusters,' appeared 'like mice hauling a little sausage.
Scarcely could we hear the Governor on the top directing them with
his trumpet; the Centaur lying close under, like a cocoa-nut shell,
to which the hawsers are affixed.' {36} In this strange fortress