Uleaborg, Karle Island, Tio, Gestila, Tornea, and all intermediate Russian ports, roads, havens, and creeks in the Gulf of Bothnia were in a similar condition. Thus, in one great outlet, the external trade of Russia was paralysed. Other but not important information reached England occasionally, of mischief done to Russian property. Thus, on the 10th of May, the Amphion and Conflict took the little town of Libau, and all the shipping in the port, merely by the terror of their arms, and without a shot being fired. The shipping captured consisted of eight merchant vessels, all new and well-found, but dismantled, and some scuttled and aground. The private property on board of them was generously restored to the owners, on application for it. Again, on the 30th of May, three English steamers, under the direction of Admiral Plumridge, destroyed the ships, dockyards, and stores at Brahestad, in the north of the Gulf of Bothnia, and damage was done to the amount of 350,000 roubles. The following day several vessels were captured off Uleaborg; and on the 1st of June, four steamers destroyed the ships, dockyards, and stores at Uleaborg-400,000 roubles' damage being done on that occasion. At Brahestad 12,000 tuns of tar, with five large vessels of 1,000 lasts each, were burnt, together with a quantity of planks and deals, used for ship-building. At Uleaborg, eight ships on the stocks, nearly finished; four old ones; together with about 18,000 tuns of pitch and tar, were given to the flames.* Soon afterwards, on the 7th of June, an attempt of the same kind, by the flying squadron of Admiral Plumridge, on the town of Gamba-Karleby, terminated unfortunately, if not with disgrace. This town is situated on a bay of the Gulf of Bothnia, some miles to the south of Brahestad, and has a trading population of 1,800 persons; an unimportant place enough; scarcely more than a village; and one would think hardly capable, with all the local assistance it could procure, to drive off two British war-steamers. Such, however, was the The official despatches, addressed by Sir Charles Napier to the secretary of the admiralty, are necessarily devoid of interest to a general reader; but we insert the following summary of them :-" Sir, I beg leave to inclose Admiral Plumridge's report of his proceedings in the Gulf of Bothnia, from the 5th of May to the 10th of June, by which their lordships will observe, that he has destroyed forty-six vessels, afloat and on the stocks, amounting to 11,000 tons; from 40,000 to 50,000 barrels of pitch and tar; 60,000 square yards of rough pitch; a great case. Nine sloops of sixteen oars, and sixteen of twenty oars, each armed with a gun, put off from the ships. One of the boats, under a flag of truce, came close to the shore, and the officer on board of it made the usual demand that the vessels and warlike stores in the harbour and town should be given up. The reply was a refusal, and the officer withdrew threatening to enter the town by force. About eleven o'clock at night, when it is still light at this period in these high latitudes, nine boats put off from the steamers, and advancing towards the shore, endeavoured to effect a landing. The inhabitants had not been idle in the interim, and the invaders were opposed by two Finland companies of the line and 100 armed inhabitants of the town. Favoured by the locality and the country buildings, they received the sailors with a cannonade and a fire, to which the artillery and musketry of the latter replied without much effect. The combat lasted until midnight, and the English were then obliged to retire with the loss of one of the boats of the Odin, some of the crew of which were killed, and the rest, amounting to twentytwo seamen, taken prisoners. In the boat were six dead bodies, one of them being that of the officer lately in command of it. With the boat the Russians also captured its flag, a bronze cannon of large calibre, munitions, guns, pistols, and the whole of its armament. Two other boats were so much damaged that they were obliged to be towed away by the rest. This petty attack was not repeated, and such laurels as could be gained from it remained with the Russians. Many people in England fancied that it would have been better for the fleet to have engaged in some great action, than to fritter away its exertions in what seemed little better than mere predatory attempts. The total loss of the English in this petty affair amounted, in killed, wounded, and missing, to fifty-four men. The French fleet, under the orders of number of stacks of timber, spars, planks, and deals, sails, rope, and various kinds of naval stores; to the amount of from £300,000 to £400,000, without the loss of a man. Admiral Plumridge has had to contend with innumerable rocks and shoals, incorrectly laid down in the charts, and met the ice up to the 30th of May; nevertheless, though several of his squadron have touched the ground, I am happy to say that they have received no damage that he is not able to repair with his own means.' It is said these stores were to be used by Russia in building gun-boats, 129 Vice-admiral Parseval Deschênes, joined that of England on the 13th of June. The united maritime forces (in the Baltic) of the two nations, therefore, amounted to fifty-four sail, armed with 2,726 guns, and supplied with 29,150 seamen and marines. The grandeur of such a display of naval power is difficult of description. Suffice it to say, that off the island of Renskar, in Baro Sound, under the flags of the two great maritime powers of the world, floated such a forest of masts as had never been seen before. The greatest harmony prevailed between both sailors and commanders of the French and English fleets. The day after the junction of the fleets, Sir Charles Napier, accompanied by Rear-admirals Cory and Chads, paid an official visit to the French admiral, on board the Inflexible. The French received them with honourable enthusiasm, and the following day Admiral Parseval Deschênes returned the visit. A Swedish paper of this period contained the following curious information concerning the corrupt character of Russian officials. It related that the commander of Sweaborg had been dismissed from his office, and sent to prison. He had not only stolen the copper roof of the fortress, but had even extended his acquisitive propensities to guns and ammunition. He had destroyed two of the bastions and planted orchards on them, and instead of cannon-shot he had heaped together wooden balls painted black! purpose, the Austrian forces, under General Schlick, had advanced to the extreme northeastern front of Galicia. The passes of the Carpathians were already watched, and occupied on each side by detachments of the respective Russian and Austrian armies. The other step taken by Austria, and supported by Prussia, was the sending a summons to the Emperor of Russia, requesting him to relinquish his "material guarantee," and recall his troops from the Danubian provinces. In this summons the Austrian government renounced all claim to be considered as a mediator between Russia and the western powers; but in polite though positive language, it requested the St. Petersburg cabinet to specify exactly the time when the imperial troops would have re-¦ turned to their own country, and trusted that the time named would not be a very distant one. The answer to this request we shall allude to when we have described an important and brilliant circumstance that influenced it. Early in June, 10,000 English troops were brought from Scutari down the Bosphorus, and across a portion of the Black Sea, to Varna. This movement gave satisfaction to the most active spirits who longed to mingle in the strife, because Varna is near the seat of war, and from it the troops could readily march to Silistria. An account of the voyage is admirably written by a correspondent of the Times, who accompanied We mentioned that Austria had con- the expedition. Too much praise can scarcely sidered it necessary to add 95,000 men to be bestowed upon the word-pictures-sunher military establishment, for the safety of pictures, some have called them-of this her empire. She now took other steps, adventurous gentleman. The following is a away from Russia, and in the direction of portion of his description of the passage of Turkey and the western powers. One was, the Bosphorus and the Black Sea :-"It to enter into an alliance with Turkey, for was five o'clock ere the last steamer which the purpose of assisting that power to reclaim had to wait for the transports got under the Danubian provinces from the then re- weigh again, and night had set in before they laxing grasp of the czar. The principal reached the entrance of the Black Sea. As conditions of it were, that if Russia retired they passed the forts (which are pretty frevoluntarily from the principalities, the Aus-quent towards the Euxine), the sentries trian troops, with the concurrence of the Porte, would enter them, and thus act as a defence to Turkey against future aggression. If Russia refused to retire, it was agreed that Austria should take such measures as might be necessary to compel her to do so. The Austrian troops were, however, only to enter the principalities for the sake of restoring tranquillity, and they were not to remain in them longer than was necessary for the safety of those territories from Russian aggression. To be in readiness for this yelled out strange challenges, and burned blue lights, and blue lights answered from our vessels in return; so that at times the whole of the scene put one in mind of a grand fairy spectacle, and it did not require much imagination to believe that the trees were the work of Grieve; that Stanfield had dashed in the water and ships; that the forts were of pasteboard; and the clouds of gauze lighted up by a property man; while those moustachioed soldiers, with red fez caps or tarbouches, eccentric blue coats and breeches, and white belts, might fairly pass for Surrey lipoli; if they are not so crooked and inexsupernumeraries. Out go the blue lights!-tricable; if they are not so rugged and fanwe are all left as blind as owls at noontide; tastically devious;--it is only because nature but our eyes recover; the stars at last begin to twinkle; two lights shine, or rather blear, hazily on either bow-they mark the opening of the Bosphorus into the Euxine. We shoot past them, and a farewell challenge and another blue halo show the sentries are wide awake. We are in the Black Sea; and lo! sea, and sky, and land, are at once shut out from us! A fog, a drifting, clammy, nasty mist, bluish-white, and cold and raw, falls down on us like a shroud, damps out the stars and all the lights of heaven, and steals with a slug-like pace down yard, and mast, and stays, sticks to the face and beard, renders the deck dark as a graveyard, and forces us all down to a rubber and coffee. This is genuine Black Sea weather. . . . In the morning the same haze continued drifting about and hugging the land; but once it rose and discovered a steamer close in-shore, with a transport cast off from her, and hovering about just as a hen watches a chicken. The Vesuvius fired a gun, and after some time the steamer tried to take the transport in tow again, and proceeded to rejoin the squadron. We subsequently found it was the Megara. The line of land was marked by a bank of white clouds, and the edge of the sea horizon was equally obscured. About half-past three the bay of Varna was visible, with the masts of some large vessels just peering up ahead; and the Victoria, her majesty's ship Vesuvius, &c., ran in and anchored before six o'clock. The Bellerophon, 74, Lord G. Paulet; the Henri Quatre (French), 90, and an Ottoman steamer, were lying in the roadstead, close to the town; and transports, Nos. 1, 2, 18, 27, 46, &c., busily engaged landing stores and men." has set the efforts of man at defiance, and has forbidden the Turk to make a town built upon a plain as unpleasant to perambulate as one founded on an irregular surface. After a cruise of upwards of 100 miles, by shores which remind one, when they can be seen through fogs and vapours, of the coast of Devonshire, and which stretch away on the western side of the Black Sea, in undulating folds of green sward rising one above the other, or swell into hilly peaks all covered with fine herbage and natural plantations of the densest foliage, so that the scenery has a park-like and cultivated air, which is only belied by the search of the telescope, the vessel bound to Varna rounds a promontory of moderate height on the left, and, passing by an earthen fort perched on the summit, anchors in a semicircular bay, about a mile. and-a-half in length and two miles across, on the northern side of which is situate the town, so well known by its siege in 1829. The bay shoals up to the beach at the apex of the semicircle formed by its shores, and the land is so low at that point that the fresh waters from the neighbouring hills form a large lake, which extends for some distance through the marsh lands and plains that run westward towards Shumla. Varna is built on a slightly elevated bank of sand, on the verge of the sea, of such varying height that, in some places, the base of the walls around it is on the level of the water, and at others stands twenty or thirty feet above it. Below this bank are a series of plains inland, which spread all round the town, till they are lost in the hills which, dipping into the sea in an abrupt promontory on the north-east side, rise in terraces to the height of 700 or 800 feet at the distance of three miles from the town, and trend away to the westward to meet the corresponding chain of hills on the southern extremity of the bay, thus enclosing the lake and plains between in a sort of natural wall, which is, like all the rest of the country, covered with brushwood and small trees. It is said also to abound in game; but as yet our guns have only succeeded in adding to the pot-au-feu some doves and woodpigeons, and a venerable hare of much rigi"Varna is such a town as only could have dity. A stone wall of ten feet high, painted been devised by a nomadic race aping the white, and loopholed, is built all around the habits of civilised nations. If the lanes are place; and some detached batteries, well not so painful to walk upon as those of Gal-provided with heavy guns, but not of much The next day, General Canrobert and a staff of officers arrived in the Caton, and shortly afterwards proceeded to call on Sir George Brown. Besides the general, 12,000 French troops were soon encamped at Varna. The following panoramic glance at this Bulgarian town, from the pen of a military man, will be read with pleasure by those who like to have a vivid and tangible idea of the various places rendered memorable by this great war: |