96 NAVAL ATTACK OF FORTIFICATIONS. 
and they absolutely forced the Admiral to attack Lissa, though he did 
not want to do so, and that ended in the miserable fiasco which one 
might have expected; but still his aim was to take Lissa for itself, and 
not because it was exerting any influence on the war. 
The fourth instance in which it may be necessary to engage batteries 
we have had some instances of lately, viz., when it is considered that 
the bombardment of the works themselves, or of the town, is likely to 
produce an adequate effect, either moral or material. Of that we had 
a notable instance at Algiers, and perhaps a more notable instance 
than any other. We wanted to produce a moral effect upon the Moors 
rather, I think, than to destroy their ships. We went in and smashed 
their forts, and the moral effect was so great that on the following day 
they gave in to all our demands. Very much the same thing happened 
at Alexandria; we knocked the forts about a bit and frightened the 
Egyptians very much, and in the night they all ran away. But we 
cannot always count upon the gunners being so much frightened as 
the Egyptians were ; so that I do not think that is altogether a safe 
precedent to follow. 
I will come first then to what I think is the more feasible operation, 
the operation of forcing the passage of a channel. One of the diffi¬ 
culties about it is, that there are not many channels to force; I do not 
think that there are half-a-dozen in the British Empire, because it is a 
necessity of the case that there should be something for the fleet to do 
as a fleet beyond, and that when they get beyond the fortifications they 
should have matters fairly their own way. Of course, we know the 
case of the Dardanelles; that is an instance which is always before us, 
and there are other instances of the same kind in which it is advan¬ 
tageous for a fleet to run past forts and then to operate in the waters 
beyond them. And, now, if you will allow me, I will describe what I 
think would be the kind of operation which would be carried out in 
the way of forcing a passage. 
First of all, it is our great idea to get the ships past quickly. We 
do not want to fight the forts. If the gunners would kindly go to 
sleep we would run past them in the night and have nothing to say to 
them ; but I am afraid we cannot count upon that. On the other hand, 
the object of the defences is to stop the ships, or, if they cannot stop 
them, to delay them so much that they will be so knocked about as to 
be unable to carry out the work that they wish to do beyond. So 
that it appears to me that .obstructions are more important in these 
cases than guns. We had a notable instance of that—our failures 
on the Peiho River; we had run our gun-boats up those Chinese rivers 
several times past forts; we had fired and the Chinese fired, and it 
generally ended in the Chinese running away, and in our going up the 
river. But in 1859 there was an expedition up the Peiho River; there 
was an ordinary fort, but there turned out to be rather an extra¬ 
ordinary obstruction. When the gun-boats got so far as the fort, they 
found that the obstruction was barring the way. They said, a We 
will knock down the fort,” but they did not succeed in knocking down 
the fort, whereas the fort succeeded in knocking the gun-boats about 
very much. The gun-boats then began to find that they had too much 
