Note 43 — MAIDA.
Reading edition
It is scarcely conceivable how much the effect of artillery depends on the position of the guns, and the accuracy with which they are pointed. One gun, well placed and skilfully served, has been known to do more execution than one hundred when laid in an unfavourable situation. This was most strikingly illustrated in an attack made by Sir Sydney Smith on a martello tower, armed with two heavy guns, and situated on the extremity of Cape Licosa.
The Pompée, of eighty guns, and two frigates, anchored within eight hundred yards of the battery, and opened their broadsides. Their fire was kept up with unremitting fury, until their ammunition failed, and many of the guns had become unserviceable. The battery returned the fire slowly—but every shot took effect. The Pompée was the only object of its fire, and she was at last completely crippled, and obliged to haul off with the loss of her mizen-top-mast, and nearly forty men killed and wounded. Almost every shot had hulled her—while the concentrated fire from three men-of-war had failed entirely in silencing the French cannonnade.
On the tower being afterwards surrendered, it appeared that the carriage of one of the guns had been disabled by the second shot, and subsequently that it had been fired as it lay on the sill of the embrasure,—so that, in point of fact, the batteries of the Pompée and her consorts had been unable to overpower the fire of a single gun, and the opposition of a garrison, consisting of one officer and twenty-five soldiers.