MALTA PRESERVED
SIR,—Mr. Bradford has asked why I said that the plan shown in his book as 'the original plan of Fort St. Elmo, dated 1552' is an eighteenth-century one. On stylistic grounds the drawing could not possibly be sixteenth-century work; its draughtsmanship (I am not relying on the version given in The Great Siege) is precisely in the manner of other eighteenth- century plans in the Royal Malta Library—and else- where for that matter. It shows the barracks and other internal buildings which his own narrative
accepts as not being there at the time of the siege and, more important still, it shows the great north-east ravelin connected to the main body of the fort, while plans and engravings of St. Elmo from 1565 to 1685—including those of 1582 reproduced between pp. 56-7, 72-3 and 88-9 of his book—uniformly make it clear that it was divided. The sketch of St. Elmo in Mr. Bradford's map on p. 28 thus contradicts the contemporary engravings as well as the important plan of the siege made by the Turks themselves and illustrated in Turk Tarih, 1934, p. 255. The join is clearly visible in the actual masonry. It is never wise to trust later inscriptions and the one quoted by Mr. Bradford does not, after all, have any bearing on the date of the plan itself.
The building history of St. Elmo is by no means clear. The evidence is scattered and unreliable—the mid-seventeenth-century plan in the Ambrosiana, Milan, is the first accurate survey I know of—but until it has been explored we shall not have a definitive history of the siege; a project in which, I may say, I have no stake beyond one of lively interest.
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