163 
£ROM ASIA MINOR TO EGfW. 
parts of their bodies, and of others brought off from the shore 
incapable of service from the injuries of the climate, presented 
a revolting picture of the ravages of war. Nor was this alL 
One day, leaning out of the cabin window, by the side of an 
officer who was employed in fishing, the corpse of a man. newly- 
sewed in a hammock, started half out of the water, and slowly 7 
continued its course, with the current, toward the shore. No¬ 
thing could be more horrible : its head and shoulders were visi¬ 
ble, turning first to one side, then to the other, with a solemn 
and awful movement, as if impressed with some dreadful secret 
of the deep, which, from its watery grave, it came upward to 
reveal. Such sights became afterward frequent, hardly a day 
passing without ushering the dead to the contemplation of the 
living, Until at length they passed without our observation. 
Orders were issued to convey as many as possible for interment 
upon Nelson’s Island, instead of casting them overboard. The 
shores of Egypt may in truth be described as washed with 
blood. The bones of thousands yet whiten in the scorching 
sun, upon the sands of Aboukir.*- If we number those who have 
fallen since the first arrival of the French upon the coast, in 
their battles with the Turks,f Arabs, and English, we shall 
find no part of their own ensanguined territory so steeped in 
human gore. Add to this the streams from slaughtered horses, 
camels, and other animals, (the stench of whose remains was 
almost sufficient to raise a pestilence even before the arrival of 
the English,) and perhaps no part of the world ever presented 
§o dreadful an example. When a land wind prevailed, our 
whole fleet felt the tainted blast: while from beneath the hulks 
of our transports, ships that had been sunk.J with all the en¬ 
cumbering bodies of men and carcasses of animals, sent through 
the waves a fearful exhalation. 
At the time of our arrival, the French had been defeated in 
three successive actions 5 that of the eighth of March, the day 
of landing our troops; the thirteenth, when the English drove 
them from the heights to which they had retreated; and the 
memorable battle of the tiventy-first, when Abercrombie fell. 
* Between the village of Utko and a place called the Caravanserai , I saw the shore 
entirely covered with human sculls and bones. Dogs were raking the sands for human 
flesh and carrien. Nelson’s Island became a complete charnel-house, where our 
sailors raised mounds of sand over the heaps of dead cast up after the action of the 
Nile. 
t Ten thousand Turks were drowned at once in the Bay of Aboukir; being driven 
into the sea by Buonaparte, after the slaughter of four thousand of their countrymen 
in the field of battle. See the plate, representing this dreadfu' massacre, in Denon's 
Voyage d'EgyptePL 89. and also a narrative of the fact. p. 259. 
t Part oftheL’Orient, with one of her cables, was raised by the crew of the Geres, 
Captain Russel, in weighing anchor. 
