“Coffee, you will never realize how much I am aided by your opinions. Two heads are better than one, particularly when one of them is capable of such a clean, unfaltering grasp of a situation as is yours.”
The General burns to be at New Orleans, and leaving Colonel Coffee to bring on his three thousand hunting-shirt men as fast as he may, gallops forward with four of his staff. It is a rough, evil road that threads those one hundred and seventy-five miles which lie between the General and the Mississippi, but he puts it behind him with amazing rapidity. At last the wide, sullen river rolls at his horse's feet.
As the General traverses the rude forest roads, difficult with November's mud and slush, a few days' sail away on the Jamaica coast may be seen proof of the pure truth of his deductions. The English admiral is reviewing his fleet of fifty ships, preparatory to a descent upon New Orleans.
It is a formidable flotilla, with ten thousand sailors and nine thousand five hundred soldiers and marines, and mounts one thousand cannon. The flagship is the _Tonnant_, eighty guns, and there sail in her company such invincibles as the _Royal Oak_, the _Norge_, the _Asia_, the _Bedford_, and the _Ramillies_, each carrying seventy-four guns. With these are the _Dictator_, the _Gorgon_, the _Annide_, the _Sea Horse_, and the _Belle Poule_, and the weakest among them better than a two-decked forty-four.
In command of this armada are such doughty spirits as Sir Alexander Cockrane, admiral of the red, Admiral Sir Edward Codrington, Rear Admiral Malcolm, and Captain Sir Thomas Hardy--“Nelson's Hardy,” who commanded the one-armed fighter's flagship _Victory_ at Trafalgar. These, with their followers, have grown gray and tired in unbroken triumph. Now, when they are making ready to spring on New Orleans, their war word is “Beauty and Booty!”
Review over, Admiral Cockrane in the van with the _Tonnant_, the fleet sails out of Negril Bay for Louisiana. As the General's horse cools his weary muzzle in the Mississippi, the English fleet has been two days on its course.
It is a dull, lowering December morning when the General, on his great war stallion, following the Bayou road, rides into New Orleans. He finds the city in a tumult, and nothing afoot for its defense. He is received by Governor Claiborne, a stately Virginian, and Mayor Girod, plump and little and gray and French, with a delegation of citizens. Among the latter is one whom the General recognizes. He is Edward Livingston, aforetime of New York, and the General's dearest friend in those old Philadelphia Congressional days. The General gives the Livingston hand a squeeze and says: “It's like medicine in wine, Ned, to see you at such a time as this.”