On the preceding evening the French and English squadrons had anchored off Marioupol, a considerable town on the military high road from the provinces of the Don to the Crimea: and on the following morning an officer of each nation was despatched to demand the surrender of the place on exactly the same terms as those offered at Taganrog. No answer having been returned, a party of Marines under Lieutenant Macnamara and a body of French smallarm men were landed, and a body of 600 Cossacks commanded by a Colonel having retired from the town on their approach, they fired and destroyed the vast quantities of grain and other stores here accumulated, without encountering opposition or suffering a single casualty.
The squadrons now repaired to Gheisk, which they reached on the 6th, and, precisely similar terms to tliose tendered at Taganrog and Marioupol having been offered to the Military Governor, Colonel Borsikoff, whose small force was quite inadequate to defend the town, were acceded to by him without demur.
A party of Marines and Frenchmen was accordingly again landed, and an enormous quantity of hay stacked on the beach ready for conveyance to the Crimea, and several thousand quarters of wheat, were destroyed by them.
The launches of the line-of-battle ships, having thus successfully effected the special service for which they had been detached, and completely scoured the Gulf of Azoff, returned to their respective ships.
Shortly after, the Kertch expedition, leaving garrisons at Kertch and Yenikale, and having accomplished every object originally contemplated, with a fortune immeasurably beyond the hopes of its most sanguine promoters, returned to Kamiesch and Balaklava. In one short fortnight the Russians had been compelled to abandon several strong positions both in the Crimea and in Circassia; the Allies were firmly established on two new points of the enemy's territory, which extended and varied their base of operations; the Sea of Azoff had been swept from one extremity to the other of the painfully accumulated provisions destined to supply the wants of the Eussian army for months — whilst the means of transporting and storing the coming crops had been everywhere destroyed; and, incredible as it must always appear whenever the fact is recalled, these vast results, which narrowed the issue between the combatants to the fate of Sebastopol, were attained without the sacrifice on the part of the Allies of one human life. Such a triumph so achieved is, in the unexaggerated sense of the phrase, without a parallel.
Nor did the successes in the Sea of Azoff terminate here.
During the summer a squadron, under the orders of Commander, now Captain, Sherard Osborne, cruised in every direction in these waters, and destroyed the new depots of corn and grain, the produce of the current year, which had been stored in spots fondly deemed even more inaccessible than those visited by the first expedition. The skill, the daring, and the judgment
THE EAST.
displayed by the officers of every grade, who, throughout this double series of difficult and dangerous operations, eagerly seized and splendidly improved every occasion of individual distinction, will ever reflect the brightest lustre on the British navy; and, if their efforts were crowned with a more bloodless triumph than has attended similar services in former wars, it was not that they were inferior to their glorious predecessors in the most dashing spirit of enterprise, or the most reckless contempt of danger.
It laurels must be dipped in blood, the severe losses of the Naval Brigade on shore have only too fully answered the sad requirement: and the heroic dead, no less than the living brave, have won for the Black Sea fleet a place in the history of the war which the lapse of time and the enlightened judgment of future generations will only qualify to mark as more and more distinguished.
To return now to the more immediate operations of the siege.
At the latter end of May the whole of the Sardinian Contingent, to the number of 15,000 men, under the command of General della Marmora, had arrived at Balaklava; the English and the French had also received large reinforcements, summer was approaching, and the supply of water on the plateau was beginning to fall short. Under these circumstances the expansion of the position became a matter of absolute necessity, and accordingly, on the 25th of the month, a force of 50,000 men, consisting principally of French, Sardinians, and Turks, quitting their old encampments, marched towards the Tchernaya.