Excerpt from Memoirs, Vol. 1 The voyage up the west coast of the peninsula was full of interest and charm, as our course lay near enough to take in much of its beauty, especially off the mouth of the Tagus with the historic Tower of Belem and the castled crag of Cintra over looking its gardens and orangeries. We entered the hill-girt Bay of Vigo, and lay for a couple of days with the beautiful prospect of its hinterland before our eyes. I made an excursion into the interior with some of my shipmates, a country rich in natural graces and peopled by as fine a race of men and women as I have seen in Europe; every woman had beauty, and both sexes were distinguished by a dignity of manner which bore the impress of good breeding. On leaving the bay we were hampered by fog, but Lord John extricated us from a critical situation without accident, though, as I was in my bath, I saw the Warrior's bowsprit above our stern walk. Later, when we were in the open sea, where distance was maintained by gunfire from the leading ship of each division, Lord John took the risk of changing course by signal, when it appeared as time passed that the port division, led by the Hercules (captain Howard), had not understood the order, and the attention of the ship was called to the lapse, this time with due effect, as, the fog lifting not long afterwards, the peccant division was seen bearing up on a course which in a few minutes would have brought it into the middle of the other lines, when disaster must have ensued. We reached Plymouth without further incident, where the Fleet broke up and I dis embarked. I parted from Buller with great regret, and saw little of him in after-years, but I recall his death at the close of a day's hunting, at the age of eighty. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.