Page:The invasion of the Crimea Vol. 9.djvu/107

OPERATIONS IN THE SKA OF AZOF. . 7 Buckley and John Roberts (gunner) at Genitchi, CHAP. and Cecil Buckley again with Henry Cooper (boatswain) at Taganrog volunteered to undertake special services of a hazardous kind, they effect- ually compassed their objects, but they did some- thing more. By dispensing with the aid of num- bers, they plainly averted the evil of having to risk many lives. The Allies put themselves to the pain of de- Tim object , „ . . ' . of the stroymg these vast stores of food, because they Allies. had ventured to hope on what at the time seemed good grounds that the check which their measure imposed on the flow of supplies to the enemy would impair, if not bring to an end, his pro- tracted defence of Sebastopol ; but Russia, as was This in afterwards known, had already provisioned her ure Wiled. army engaged under Gortchakoff for the whole of the then pending year, and was not therefore brought to extremities by losses which rather affected the great reserve magazines than any immediate wants. The havoc, however, was great. In the first Greatness f tin four days of the operations in the Sea of Azof, it havoc already included the destruction of 246 vessels, a number soon augmented to one which our admiral pronounced to be 'nearly 500'; and on the 2d of June (a day long antecedent to the close of the destructive operations) he officially stated that the destructive operations conducted in the Sea of Azof had already overtaken a quantity of flour ami corn which, if added to what was destroyed by the hands of the Russians themselves (as