almost overwhelm me. … I like my ship very much; as the last gift of that excellent man I shall ever consider her, and stay in her during the war.’ Through the summer of 1806 the Amphion was on the coast of Naples and Sicily under the orders of Sir W. Sidney Smith [q.v.] and (30 June) was employed in the transport of the little army which, on 4 July, won the battle of Maida, and afterwards co-operated with General Brodrick in the reduction of Reggio, Cotrone, and other places on the Calabrian coast. In June 1807 she returned to England to refit, and after being six months in the dockyard sailed again for the Mediterranean. In April 1808 she was off Toulon, watching the French squadron which had just returned from its cruise to Corfu [see Collingwood, Cuthbert, Lord], and on 12 May had a sharp encounter with the Baleine, armed storeship, lying in the Bay of Rosas, under three heavy batteries. The Baleine was driven ashore, but could not be destroyed. The commander-in-chief, however, expressed his warm approbation of Hoste's conduct, and in August sent him to the Adriatic, where, sometimes under the orders of a senior officer, but also often independent, he continued carrying on a brisk and successful partisan war, destroying signal stations, cutting out gunboats, making a large number of prizes, and almost completely stopping the coasting trade. ‘From 23 June 1808 to Christmas day 1809 the Amphion took or destroyed 218 of the enemy's vessels.’ ‘It looks well on paper,’ Hoste wrote, ‘but has not put much cash in our pockets, owing to the difficulty attending their being sent to port;’ most of them, including several of considerable value, had to be destroyed. At Christmas 1809, while the Amphion and a sloop dominated the Adriatic, there were at Ancona and Venice four French frigates, several brigs and schooners, and numerous gunboats, besides a Russian squadron of four ships of the line and two frigates at Trieste. ‘The truth is,’ Hoste wrote, ‘they are afraid of the weather, and are very badly manned; we are well manned, and do not care a fig about the weather.’ In January the Amphion was joined by the Active of 36 guns [see Gordon, Sir James Alexander], and in February by the Cerberus, a 32-gun frigate; and with these under his command he harassed the French positions with renewed vigour. On 23 April 1810 he wrote: ‘We have been very fortunate since we left Malta in March, and have taken and destroyed forty-six sail of vessels, some of which are very good ones, and will bring us in a little pewter. … I was at Fiume the other day … and took a prize, and a very good one, from under their very guns, in open day.’ On 28 June he landed the marines and small-arm men of his little squadron at Grao, where there were several vessels laden with naval stores and guarded by a detachment of French soldiers. After a sharp skirmish Hoste took the town, made prisoners of the garrison of forty men, brought out five of the vessels, and burnt eleven, besides fourteen of small size (James, v. 120).
Hoste was now established at Lissa. Besides preying on the traffic by which the French occupation was supported, he was watching the frigate squadron which the French were organising. In September the squadron put to sea, made a dash at Lissa, where they found and recaptured some of the English prizes, and were back in Ancona before Hoste had any exact intelligence of their movements (ib. v. 122). In November the English squadron was joined by the Volage of 22 guns [see Hornby, Sir Phipps]; and, after being driven to Malta to refit, it arrived again off Lissa just as, on 11 March, the French commodore, Dubourdieu, sailed from Ancona with the intention of occupying the island. He had with him three French 40-gun frigates and three Venetian frigates, one of which was also of 40 guns, with five smaller vessels, and carrying, in addition to their complements, some five hundred troops, the proposed garrison of Lissa. On the morning of 13 March 1811 the two squadrons came in sight of each other; and Dubourdieu, in the Favorite, leading down to the English line, attempted, after a short cannonade, to lay the Amphion on board. But a howitzer, loaded to the muzzle with musket-bullets, swept the Favorite's deck as she closed with her men crowded on the forecastle; her loss was thus very severe; Dubourdieu himself was killed; and partly from the loss of men, partly from the damage to her rigging, partly too from Hoste's admirable manœuvring, the ship went ashore, where she was abandoned and set on fire. Meantime, after an extremely sharp action, the Flore, another French frigate, struck to the Amphion (although she afterwards escaped), and a few minutes later the Venetian Bellona also struck. The Corona, another Venetian, after having been warmly engaged with the Cerberus, struck to the Active; when the Danae, which had been very roughly handled by the little Volage's 32-pounder carronades, and the Carolina hauled their wind and fled. Hoste himself was severely wounded by the explosion of a chest of musket cartridges, and the total loss of the English in killed and wounded was 190; that of the enemy amounted to upwards of seven hundred. Owing to the vast numerical
