Napoleon had projected vast fortifications, dock-yards, and naval arsenals at Flushing and Antwerp for the protection of a maritime force in the Scheldt.  But no sooner was the execution of this project begun, than the English fitted out an expedition to seize upon the defences of the Scheldt, and capture or destroy the naval force.  Flushing, at the mouth of the river, was but ill-secured, and Antwerp, some sixty or seventy miles further up the river, was entirely defenceless; the rampart was unarmed with cannon, dilapidated, and tottering, and its garrison consisted of only about two hundred invalids and recruits.  Napoleon’s regular army was employed on the Danube and in the Peninsula.  The British attacking force consisted of thirty-seven ships of the line, twenty-three frigates, thirty-three sloops of war, twenty-eight gun, mortar, and bomb vessels, thirty-six smaller vessels, eighty-two gunboats, innumerable transports, with over forty thousand troops, and an immense artillery train; making in all, says the English historian, “an hundred thousand combatants.”  A landing was made upon the island of Walcheren, and siege laid to Flushing, which place was not reduced till eighteen days after the landing; the attack upon the water was made by seven or eight ships of the line, and a large flotilla of bomb vessels, but produced no effect.  The channel at the mouth of the river was too broad to be defended by the works of Flushing, and the main portion of the fleet passed out of reach of the guns, and ascended the Scheldt part way up to Antwerp.  But in the mean time, the fortifications of that place had been repaired, and, after a fruitless operation of a whole month in the river, the English were gradually forced to retreat to Walcheren, and finally to evacuate their entire conquest.

The cost of the expedition was immense, both in treasure and in life.  It was certainly very poorly managed.  But we cannot help noticing the superior value of fortifications as a defence against such descents.  They did much to retard the operations of the enemy till a defensive army could be raised.  The works of Flushing were never intended to close up the Scheldt, and of course could not intercept the passage of shipping; but they were not reduced by the English naval force, as has sometimes been alleged.  Col.  Mitchel, of the English service, says that the fleet “kept up so tremendous a fire upon the batteries, that the French officers who had been present at Austerlitz and Jena declared that the cannonade in these battles had been a mere jeu d’enfans in comparison.  Yet what was the effect produced on the defences of the place by this fire, so formidable, to judge by the sound alone?  The writer can answer the question with some accuracy, for he went along the entire sea-line the very day after the capitulation, and found no part of the parapet injured so as to be of the slightest consequence, and only one solitary gun dismounted, evidently by the bursting of a shell, and which could not, of course, have been thrown from the line of battle ships, but must have been thrown from the land batteries."[16]