The dockyard magazines at Kertch contained quantities of military and naval stores — boiler plates, lathes, engineers' tools, paint, canvas, hemp and chain cables, bales of greatcoats, uniform jackets, trowsers and caps, knapsacks, belts, bayonets, swords, scabbards, anchors, copper nails and bolts, implements of foundry, brass, rudder-pintles, lead, &c. The French were busy for a few days in taking the clothing, &c, out of the storehouses and destroyiog it. The valuable stores were divided between the allies, according to their good. fortune and energy in appropriation. Numbers of old boats, of large rudders, covered with copper and hung on brass, of small guns, of shot, shell, grape, and canister, were lying in the dockyard. An infernal machine of curious construction attracted a great deal of attention. Like most devices of the kind, it had failed to be of the slightest service. Outside the walls of the dockyard, which was filled with oxen and horses, was another long range of public buildings and storehouses, which had been nearly all gutted and destroyed. Soldiers' caps, belts, coats, trowsers, cartouche-boxes, knapsacks, and canteens, were strewn all over the quay in front of them. In a word, Kertch had ceased to be a military or naval station, and the possession which Russia so eagerly coveted a few years before was of no more use to her than the snows of the Tchatir Dagh.
On Friday night the work of destroying Kussian stores began; the French hurled guns into the sea, tore up the platforms, and exploded the shells found in the magazines. Parties of boats were sent in all directions to secure and burn prizes, to fire the storehouses and huts on the sandbanks j by day the sky was streaked
[fragment illegible in the scan of the first edition]
CRIMEA.
with lines of smoke, and by night the air was illuminated by the blaze of forts, houses, magazines, and vessels aground on the flats for miles around us.
The Austrian Consul was found to have a large store of corn, which he concealed in magazines painted and decorated to pass as part of his dwelling-house. It was all destroyed. Amid the necessary destruction, private plunderers found facility for their work. The scene presented by the town could only be likened to that presented by Palmyra, fresh from the hands of the destroyer, or some other type of desolation. Along the quay there was a long line of walls, which once were the fronts of storehouses, magazines, mansions, and palaces. They were empty shells, hollow and roofless, with fire burning luridly within them by night, and streaks and clouds of parti-coloured smoke arising from them by day. The white walls were barred with black bands where the fire had rushed out of the window-frames. These storehouses belonged to Russians, and were full of corn — these magazines were the enemy's —these mansions belonged to their nobles and governors — and these palaces were the residences of their princes and rulers; and so far we carried on war with all the privileges of war, and used all the consequences of conquest. In the whole lengthened front facing the sea, and the wide quay which bordered it, there was not an edifice untouched but one. This was a fine mansion, with a grand semicircular front, ornamented with rich entablatures and a few Grecian pillars. The windows permitted one to see massive mirrors and the framework of pictures and the glitter of brasswork. Inside the open door an old man in an arm-chair received everybody. How deferential he was! how he bowed! how graceful, deprecatory, and soothing the modulation of his trunk and arms! But these were nothing to his smile. His face seemed a kind of laughingclock, wound up to act for so many hours. When the machinery was feeble, towards evening, the laugh degenerated into a grin, but he had managed with nods, and cheeks wreathed in smiles, and a little bad German and French, to inform all comers that this house was specially under English and French protection, and thus to save it from plunder and pillage. The house belonged, on dit, to Prince Woronzoff, and the guardian angel was an aged servitor of the Prince, who, being paralytic, was left behind, and had done good service in his arm-chair.