But all these suggestions surely
proceeded from ignorance or malevolence, or else the admiral would
not have found it such an easy matter, at his return to England, to
justify his conduct to a ministry at once so upright and discerning.
True it is, that those who undertook to vindicate him on the spot,
asserted, that there was not water enough for our great ships near
the town: though this was a little unfortunately urged, because
there happened to be pilots in the fleet perfectly well acquainted
with the soundings of the harbour, who affirmed there was water
enough for five eighty-gun ships to lie abreast almost up to the
very walls. The disappointments we suffered occasioned a universal
dejection, which was not at all alleviated by the objects that daily
and hourly entertained our eyes, nor by the prospect of what must
have inevitably happened, had we remained much longer in this
place. Such was the economy in some ships that, rather than be at
the trouble of interring the dead, their commanders ordered their
men to throw their bodies overboard, many without either ballast
or winding-sheet; so that numbers of human carcases floated in
the harbour, until they were devoured by sharks and carrion crows,
which afforded no agreeable spectacle to those who survived, At
the same time the wet season began, during which a deluge of rain
falls, from the rising to the setting sun, without intermission,
and that no sooner ceases than it begins to thunder, and lighten
with such continued flashing, that one can see to read a very small
print by the illumination.
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