Page:A book of the Pyrenees.djvu/61

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THE LANDES
43

reached Bayonne; the commandant of the citadel was well aware of it, but could not resist the treacherous attempt to retrieve his laurels by catching the British unprepared.

His assault was repulsed, with the loss of 830 men to the British, and with the capture of Sir John Hope, who was wounded. The French attack was supported by the fire of the gunboats on the river, which opened indiscriminately on friend and foe. The French lost 910 men.

The cemetery where our gallant fellow-countrymen lie who thus fell is on the edge of the Landes, on the north side of the Adour. When Queen Victoria visited Biarritz, as also recently when King Edward VII was there, this cemetery was duly visited by both monarchs. No one who remains any length of time in Bayonne should omit a visit to the beautiful lakes that lie embosomed in cork woods and pine forests in the Landes, in the abandoned course of the Adour. The river, instead of entering the sea where it does now, formerly turned north, and had its mouth at Cape Breton, something like ten miles distant. But at the close of the fourteenth century a violent tempest blowing from the west threw up a barrier of sand and blocked the mouth of the Adour, which then pursued its course northward, and finally discharged its waters into the Atlantic at Vieux-Boucau, and that remained its mouth for two centuries. But in 1579, the inhabitants of Bayonne, aided by a flood, managed to pierce the isthmus of sand-hills which separated their town from the sea, and thus created a new mouth for the river. The Adour, however, pours into the bay in a contrary direction to the prevailing winds, consequently there is an incessant struggle going on there between the current and the waves, resulting in a deposit of mud, sand, and pebble, and the building up of a bar which the sea is incessantly driving towards the shore,