Hogue, it was the last serious effort made by the navy of Louis XIV. in this war. Want of money compelled him to lay his fleet up. The allies were now free to make full use of their own, to harass the French coast, to intercept French commerce, and to co-operate with the armies acting against France. Some of the operations undertaken by them were more remarkable for the violence of the effort than for the magnitude of the results. The numerous bombardments of French Channel ports, and the attempts to destroy St Malo, the great nursery of the active French privateers, by infernal machines, did little harm. A British attack on Brest in June 1694 was beaten off with heavy loss. The scheme had been betrayed by Jacobite correspondents. Yet the inability of the French king to avert these enterprises showed the weakness of his navy and the limitations of his power. The protection of British and Dutch commerce was never complete, for the French privateers were active to the end. But French commerce was wholly ruined.
It was the misfortune of the allies that their co-operation with armies was largely with the forces of a power so languid and so bankrupt as Spain. Yet the series of operations directed by Russel in the Mediterranean throughout 1694 and 1695 demonstrated the superiority of the allied fleet, and checked the advance of the French in Catalonia. Contemporary with the campaigns in Europe was a long series of cruises against the French in the West Indies, undertaken by the British navy, with more or less help from the Dutch and a little feeble assistance from the Spaniards. They began with the cruise of Captain Lawrence Wright in 1690–1691, and ended with that of Admiral Nevil in 1696–1697. It cannot be said that they attained to any very honourable achievement, or even did much to weaken the French hold on their possessions in the West Indies and North America. Some, and notably the attack made on Quebec by Sir William Phips in 1690, with a force raised in the British colonies, ended in defeat. None of them was so triumphant as the plunder of Cartagena in South America by the Frenchman Pointis, in 1697, at the head of a semi-piratical force. Too often there was absolute misconduct. In the buccaneering and piratical atmosphere of the West Indies, the naval officers of the day, who were still infected with the corruption of the reign of Charles II., and who calculated on distance from home to secure them immunity, sank nearly to the level of pirates and buccaneers. The indifference of the age to the laws of health, and its ignorance of them, caused the ravages of disease to be frightful. In the case of Admiral Nevil’s squadron, the admiral himself and all his captains except one, died during the cruise, and the ships were unmanned. Yet it was their own vices which caused these expeditions to fail, and not the strength of the French defence. When the war ended, the navy of King Louis XIV. had disappeared from the sea.
See Burchett, Memoirs of Transactions at Sea during the War with France, 1688–1697 (London, 1703); Lediard, Naval History (London, 1735), particularly valuable for the quotations in his notes. For the West Indian voyages, Tronde, Batailles navales de la France (Paris, 1867); De Yonghe, Geschiedenis van het Nederlandsche Zeewezen (Haarlem, 1860). (D. H.)
GRAND CANARY (Gran Canaria), an island in the Atlantic
Ocean, forming part of the Spanish archipelago of the Canary Islands
(q.v.). Pop. (1900) 127,471; area 523 sq. m. Grand
Canary, the most fertile island of the group, is nearly circular
in shape, with a diameter of 24 m. and a circumference of 75 m.
The interior is a mass of mountain with ravines radiating to
the shore. Its highest peak, Los Pexos, is 6400 ft. Large
tracts are covered with native pine (P. canariensis). There are
several mineral springs on the island. Las Palmas (pop. 44,517),
the capital, is described in a separate article. Telde (8978),
the second place in the island, stands on a plain, surrounded
by palm trees. At Atalaya, a short distance from Las Palmas,
the making of earthenware vessels employs some hundreds
of people, who inhabit holes made in the tufa.
GRAND CANYON, a profound gorge in the north-west corner
of Arizona, in the south-western part of the United States of
America, carved in the plateau region by the Colorado river.
Of it Captain Dutton says: “Those who have long and carefully
studied the Grand Canyon of the Colorado do not hesitate for
a moment to pronounce it by far the most sublime of all
earthly spectacles”; and this is also the verdict of many who
have only viewed it in one or two of its parts.
The Colorado river is made by the junction of two large streams, the Green and Grand, fed by the rains and snows of the Rocky Mountains. It has a length of about 2000 m. and a drainage area of 255,000 sq. m., emptying into the head of the Gulf of California. In its course the Colorado passes through a mountain section; then a plateau section; and finally a desert lowland section which extends to its mouth. It is in the plateau section that the Grand Canyon is situated. Here the surface of the country lies from 5000 to 9000 ft. above sea-level, being a tableland region of buttes and mesas diversified by lava intrusions, flows and cinder cones. The region consists in the main of stratified rocks bodily uplifted in a nearly horizontal position, though profoundly faulted here and there, and with some moderate folding. For a thousand miles the river has cut a series of canyons, bearing different names, which reach their culmination in the Marble Canyon, 66 m. long, and the contiguous Grand Canyon which extends for a distance of 217 m. farther down stream, making a total length of continuous canyon from 2000 to 6000 ft. in depth, for a distance of 283 m., the longest and deepest canyon in the world. This huge gash in the earth is the work of the Colorado river, with accompanying weathering, through long ages; and the river is still engaged in deepening it as it rushes along the canyon bottom.
The higher parts of the enclosing plateau have sufficient rainfall for forests, whose growth is also made possible in part by the cool climate and consequently retarded evaporation; but the less elevated portions have an arid climate, while the climate in the canyon bottom is that of the true desert. Thus the canyon is really in a desert region, as is shown by the fact that only two living streams enter the river for a distance of 500 m. from the Green river to the lower end of the Grand Canyon; and only one, the Kanab Creek, enters the Grand Canyon itself. This, moreover, is dry during most of the year. In spite of this lack of tributaries, a large volume of water flows through the canyon at all seasons of the year, some coming from the scattered tributaries, some from springs, but most from the rains and snows of the distant mountains about the headwaters. Owing to enclosure between steeply rising canyon walls, evaporation is retarded, thus increasing the possibility of the long journey of the water from the mountains to the sea across a vast stretch of arid land.
The river in the canyon varies from a few feet to an unknown depth, and at times of flood has a greatly increased volume. The river varies in width from 50 ft. in some of the narrow Granite Gorges, where it bathes both rock walls, to 500 or 600 ft. in more open places. In the 283 m. of the Marble and Grand Canyons, the river falls 2330 ft., and at one point has a fall of 210 ft. in 10 m. The current velocity varies from 3 to 20 or more miles per hour, being increased in places by low falls and rapids; but there are no high falls below the junction of the Green and Grand.
Besides the canyons of the main river, there are a multitude of lateral canyons occupied by streams at intervals of heavy rain. As Powell says, the region “is a composite of thousands, and tens of thousands of gorges.” There are “thousands of gorges like that below Niagara Falls, and there are a thousand Yosemites.” The largest of all, the Grand Canyon, has an average depth of 4000 ft. and a width of 412 to 12 m. For a long distance, where crossing the Kaibab plateau, the depth is 6000 ft. For much of the distance there is an inner narrower gorge sunk in the bottom of a broad outer canyon. The narrow gorge is in some places no more than 3500 ft. wide at the top. To illustrate the depth of the Grand Canyon, Powell writes: “Pluck up Mount Washington (6293 ft. high) by the roots to the level of the sea, and drop it head first into the Grand Canyon, and the dam will not force its waters over the wall.”
While there are notable differences in the Grand Canyon from point to point, the main elements are much alike throughout
