________________________________________________
_ So Boy Jim went down to the George, at Crawley, under the charge of
Jim Belcher and Champion Harrison, to train for his great fight with
Crab Wilson, of Gloucester, whilst every club and bar parlour of
London rang with the account of how he had appeared at a supper of
Corinthians, and beaten the formidable Joe Berks in four rounds. I
remembered that afternoon at Friar's Oak when Jim had told me that
he would make his name known, and his words had come true sooner
than he could have expected it, for, go where one might, one heard
of nothing but the match between Sir Lothian Hume and Sir Charles
Tregellis, and the points of the two probable combatants. The
betting was still steadily in favour of Wilson, for he had a number
of bye-battles to set against this single victory of Jim's, and it
was thought by connoisseurs who had seen him spar that the singular
defensive tactics which had given him his nickname would prove very
puzzling to a raw antagonist. In height, strength, and reputation
for gameness there was very little to choose between them, but
Wilson had been the more severely tested.
It was but a few days before the battle that my father made his
promised visit to London. The seaman had no love of cities, and was
happier wandering over the Downs, and turning his glass upon every
topsail which showed above the horizon, than when finding his way
among crowded streets, where, as he complained, it was impossible to
keep a course by the sun, and hard enough by dead reckoning.
Rumours of war were in the air, however, and it was necessary that
he should use his influence with Lord Nelson if a vacancy were to be
found either for himself or for me.
My uncle had just set forth, as was his custom of an evening, clad
in his green riding-frock, his plate buttons, his Cordovan boots,
and his round hat, to show himself upon his crop-tailed tit in the
Mall. I had remained behind, for, indeed, I had already made up my
mind that I had no calling for this fashionable life. These men,
with their small waists, their gestures, and their unnatural ways,
had become wearisome to me, and even my uncle, with his cold and
patronizing manner, filled me with very mixed feelings. My thoughts
were back in Sussex, and I was dreaming of the kindly, simple ways
of the country, when there came a rat-tat at the knocker, the ring
of a hearty voice, and there, in the doorway, was the smiling,
weather-beaten face, with the puckered eyelids and the light blue
eyes.
"Why, Roddy, you are grand indeed!" he cried. "But I had rather see
you with the King's blue coat upon your back than with all these
frills and ruffles."
"And I had rather wear it, father."
"It warms my heart to hear you say so. Lord Nelson has promised me
that he would find a berth for you, and to-morrow we shall seek him
out and remind him of it. But where is your uncle?"
"He is riding in the Mall."
A look of relief passed over my father's honest face, for he was
never very easy in his brother-in-law's company. "I have been to
the Admiralty," said he, "and I trust that I shall have a ship when
war breaks out; by all accounts it will not be long first. Lord St.
Vincent told me so with his own lips. But I am at Fladong's,
Rodney, where, if you will come and sup with me, you will see some
of my messmates from the Mediterranean."
When you think that in the last year of the war we had 140,000
seamen and mariners afloat, commanded by 4000 officers, and that
half of these had been turned adrift when the Peace of Amiens laid
their ships up in the Hamoaze or Portsdown creek, you will
understand that London, as well as the dockyard towns, was full of
seafarers. You could not walk the streets without catching sight of
the gipsy-faced, keen-eyed men whose plain clothes told of their
thin purses as plainly as their listless air showed their weariness
of a life of forced and unaccustomed inaction. Amid the dark
streets and brick houses there was something out of place in their
appearance, as when the sea-gulls, driven by stress of weather, are
seen in the Midland shires. Yet while prize-courts procrastinated,
or there was a chance of an appointment by showing their sunburned
faces at the Admiralty, so long they would continue to pace with
their quarter-deck strut down Whitehall, or to gather of an evening
to discuss the events of the last war or the chances of the next at
Fladong's, in Oxford Street, which was reserved as entirely for the
Navy as Slaughter's was for the Army, or Ibbetson's for the Church
of England.
It did not surprise me, therefore, that we should find the large
room in which we supped crowded with naval men, but I remember that
what did cause me some astonishment was to observe that all these
sailors, who had served under the most varying conditions in all
quarters of the globe, from the Baltic to the East Indies, should
have been moulded into so uniform a type that they were more like
each other than brother is commonly to brother. The rules of the
service insured that every face should be clean-shaven, every head
powdered, and every neck covered by the little queue of natural hair
tied with a black silk ribbon. Biting winds and tropical suns had
combined to darken them, whilst the habit of command and the menace
of ever-recurring dangers had stamped them all with the same
expression of authority and of alertness. There were some jovial
faces amongst them, but the older officers, with their deep-lined
cheeks and their masterful noses, were, for the most part, as
austere as so many weather-beaten ascetics from the desert. Lonely
watches, and a discipline which cut them off from all companionship,
had left their mark upon those Red Indian faces. For my part, I
could hardly eat my supper for watching them. Young as I was, I
knew that if there were any freedom left in Europe it was to these
men that we owed it; and I seemed to read upon their grim, harsh
features the record of that long ten years of struggle which had
swept the tricolour from the seas.
When we had finished our supper, my father led me into the great
coffee-room, where a hundred or more officers may have been
assembled, drinking their wine and smoking their long clay pipes,
until the air was as thick as the main-deck in a close-fought
action. As we entered we found ourselves face to face with an
elderly officer who was coming out. He was a man with large,
thoughtful eyes, and a full, placid face--such a face as one would
expect from a philosopher and a philanthropist, rather than from a
fighting seaman.
"Here's Cuddie Collingwood," whispered my father.
"Halloa, Lieutenant Stone!" cried the famous admiral very cheerily.
"I have scarce caught a glimpse of you since you came aboard the
Excellent after St. Vincent. You had the luck to be at the Nile
also, I understand?"
"I was third of the Theseus, under Millar, sir."
"It nearly broke my heart to have missed it. I have not yet
outlived it. To think of such a gallant service, and I engaged in
harassing the market-boats, the miserable cabbage-carriers of St.
Luccars!"
"Your plight was better than mine, Sir Cuthbert," said a voice from
behind us, and a large man in the full uniform of a post-captain
took a step forward to include himself in our circle. His mastiff
face was heavy with emotion, and he shook his head miserably as he
spoke.
"Yes, yes, Troubridge, I can understand and sympathize with your
feelings."
"I passed through torment that night, Collingwood. It left a mark
on me that I shall never lose until I go over the ship's side in a
canvas cover. To have my beautiful Culloden laid on a sandbank just
out of gunshot. To hear and see the fight the whole night through,
and never to pull a lanyard or take the tompions out of my guns.
Twice I opened my pistol-case to blow out my brains, and it was but
the thought that Nelson might have a use for me that held me back."
Collingwood shook the hand of the unfortunate captain.
"Admiral Nelson was not long in finding a use for you, Troubridge,"
said he. "We have all heard of your siege of Capua, and how you ran
up your ship's guns without trenches or parallels, and fired point-
blank through the embrasures."
The melancholy cleared away from the massive face of the big seaman,
and his deep laughter filled the room.
"I'm not clever enough or slow enough for their Z-Z fashions," said
he. "We got alongside and slapped it in through their port-holes
until they struck their colours. But where have you been, Sir
Cuthbert?"
"With my wife and my two little lasses at Morpeth in the North
Country. I have but seen them this once in ten years, and it may be
ten more, for all I know, ere I see them again. I have been doing
good work for the fleet up yonder."
"I had thought, sir, that it was inland," said my father.
Collingwood took a little black bag out of his pocket and shook it.
"Inland it is," said he, "and yet I have done good work for the
fleet there. What do you suppose I hold in this bag?"
"Bullets," said Troubridge.
"Something that a sailor needs even more than that," answered the
admiral, and turning it over he tilted a pile of acorns on to his
palm. "I carry them with me in my country walks, and where I see a
fruitful nook I thrust one deep with the end of my cane. My oak
trees may fight those rascals over the water when I am long
forgotten. Do you know, lieutenant, how many oaks go to make an
eighty-gun ship?"
My father shook his head.
"Two thousand, no less. For every two-decked ship that carries the
white ensign there is a grove the less in England. So how are our
grandsons to beat the French if we do not give them the trees with
which to build their ships?"
He replaced his bag in his pocket, and then, passing his arm through
Troubridge's, they went through the door together.
"There's a man whose life might help you to trim your own course,"
said my father, as we took our seats at a vacant table. "He is ever
the same quiet gentleman, with his thoughts busy for the comfort of
his ship's company, and his heart with his wife and children whom he
has so seldom seen. It is said in the fleet that an oath has never
passed his lips, Rodney, though how he managed when he was first
lieutenant of a raw crew is more than I can conceive. But they all
love Cuddie, for they know he's an angel to fight. How d'ye do,
Captain Foley? My respects, Sir Ed'ard! Why, if they could but
press the company, they would man a corvette with flag officers."
"There's many a man here, Rodney," continued my father, as he
glanced about him, "whose name may never find its way into any book
save his own ship's log, but who in his own way has set as fine an
example as any admiral of them all. We know them, and talk of them
in the fleet, though they may never be bawled in the streets of
London. There's as much seamanship and pluck in a good cutter
action as in a line-o'-battleship fight, though you may not come by
a title nor the thanks of Parliament for it. There's Hamilton, for
example, the quiet, pale-faced man who is learning against the
pillar. It was he who, with six rowing-boats, cut out the 44-gun
frigate Hermione from under the muzzles of two hundred shore-guns in
the harbour of Puerto Cabello. No finer action was done in the
whole war. There's Jaheel Brenton, with the whiskers. It was he
who attacked twelve Spanish gunboats in his one little brig, and
made four of them strike to him. There's Walker, of the Rose
cutter, who, with thirteen men, engaged three French privateers with
crews of a hundred and forty-six. He sank one, captured one, and
chased the third. How are you, Captain Ball? I hope I see you
well?"
Two or three of my father's acquaintances who had been sitting close
by drew up their chairs to us, and soon quite a circle had formed,
all talking loudly and arguing upon sea matters, shaking their long,
red-tipped pipes at each other as they spoke. My father whispered
in my ear that his neighbour was Captain Foley, of the Goliath, who
led the van at the Nile, and that the tall, thin, foxy-haired man
opposite was Lord Cochrane, the most dashing frigate captain in the
Service. Even at Friar's Oak we had heard how, in the little
Speedy, of fourteen small guns with fifty-four men, he had carried
by boarding the Spanish frigate Gamo with her crew of three hundred.
It was easy to see that he was a quick, irascible, high-blooded man,
for he was talking hotly about his grievances with a flush of anger
upon his freckled cheeks.
"We shall never do any good upon the ocean until we have hanged the
dockyard contractors," he cried. "I'd have a dead dockyard
contractor as a figure-head for every first-rate in the fleet, and a
provision dealer for every frigate. I know them with their puttied
seams and their devil bolts, risking five hundred lives that they
may steal a few pounds' worth of copper. What became of the Chance,
and of the Martin, and of the Orestes? They foundered at sea, and
were never heard of more, and I say that the crews of them were
murdered men."
Lord Cochrane seemed to be expressing the views of all, for a murmur
of assent, with a mutter of hearty, deep-sea curses, ran round the
circle.
"Those rascals over yonder manage things better," said an old one-
eyed captain, with the blue-and-white riband for St. Vincent peeping
out of his third buttonhole. "They sheer away their heads if they
get up to any foolery. Did ever a vessel come out of Toulon as my
38-gun frigate did from Plymouth last year, with her masts rolling
about until her shrouds were like iron bars on one side and hanging
in festoons upon the other? The meanest sloop that ever sailed out
of France would have overmatched her, and then it would be on me,
and not on this Devonport bungler, that a court-martial would be
called."
They loved to grumble, those old salts, for as soon as one had shot
off his grievance his neighbour would follow with another, each more
bitter than the last.
"Look at our sails!" cried Captain Foley. "Put a French and a
British ship at anchor together, and how can you tell which is
which?"
"Frenchy has his fore and maintop-gallant masts about equal," said
my father.
"In the old ships, maybe, but how many of the new are laid down on
the French model? No, there's no way of telling them at anchor.
But let them hoist sail, and how d'you tell them then?"
"Frenchy has white sails," cried several.
"And ours are black and rotten. That's the difference. No wonder
they outsail us when the wind can blow through our canvas."
"In the Speedy," said Cochrane, "the sailcloth was so thin that,
when I made my observation, I always took my meridian through the
foretopsail and my horizon through the foresail."
There was a general laugh at this, and then at it they all went
again, letting off into speech all those weary broodings and silent
troubles which had rankled during long years of service, for an iron
discipline prevented them from speaking when their feet were upon
their own quarter-decks. One told of his powder, six pounds of
which were needed to throw a ball a thousand yards. Another cursed
the Admiralty Courts, where a prize goes in as a full-rigged ship
and comes out as a schooner. The old captain spoke of the
promotions by Parliamentary interest which had put many a youngster
into the captain's cabin when he should have been in the gun-room.
And then they came back to the difficulty of finding crews for their
vessels, and they all together raised up their voices and wailed.
"What is the use of building fresh ships," cried Foley, "when even
with a ten-pound bounty you can't man the ships that you have got?"
But Lord Cochrane was on the other side in this question.
"You'd have the men, sir, if you treated them well when you got
them," said he. "Admiral Nelson can get his ships manned. So can
Admiral Collingwood. Why? Because he has thought for the men, and
so the men have thought for him. Let men and officers know and
respect each other, and there's no difficulty in keeping a ship's
company. It's the infernal plan of turning a crew over from ship to
ship and leaving the officers behind that rots the Navy. But I have
never found a difficulty, and I dare swear that if I hoist my
pennant to-morrow I shall have all my old Speedies back, and as many
volunteers as I care to take."
"That is very well, my lord," said the old captain, with some
warmth; "when the Jacks hear that the Speedy took fifty vessels in
thirteen months, they are sure to volunteer to serve with her
commander. Every good cruiser can fill her complement quickly
enough. But it is not the cruisers that fight the country's battles
and blockade the enemy's ports. I say that all prize-money should
be divided equally among the whole fleet, and until you have such a
rule, the smartest men will always be found where they are of least
service to any one but themselves."
This speech produced a chorus of protests from the cruiser officers
and a hearty agreement from the line-of-battleship men, who seemed
to be in the majority in the circle which had gathered round. From
the flushed faces and angry glances it was evident that the question
was one upon which there was strong feeling upon both sides.
"What the cruiser gets the cruiser earns," cried a frigate captain.
"Do you mean to say, sir," said Captain Foley, "that the duties of
an officer upon a cruiser demand more care or higher professional
ability than those of one who is employed upon blockade service,
with a lee coast under him whenever the wind shifts to the west, and
the topmasts of an enemy's squadron for ever in his sight?"
"I do not claim higher ability, sir."
"Then why should you claim higher pay? Can you deny that a seaman
before the mast makes more in a fast frigate than a lieutenant can
in a battleship?"
"It was only last year," said a very gentlemanly-looking officer,
who might have passed for a buck upon town had his skin not been
burned to copper in such sunshine as never bursts upon London--"it
was only last year that I brought the old Alexander back from the
Mediterranean, floating like an empty barrel and carrying nothing
but honour for her cargo. In the Channel we fell in with the
frigate Minerva from the Western Ocean, with her lee ports under
water and her hatches bursting with the plunder which had been too
valuable to trust to the prize crews. She had ingots of silver
along her yards and bowsprit, and a bit of silver plate at the truck
of the masts. My Jacks could have fired into her, and would, too,
if they had not been held back. It made them mad to think of all
they had done in the south, and then to see this saucy frigate
flashing her money before their eyes."
"I cannot see their grievance, Captain Ball," said Cochrane.
"When you are promoted to a two-decker, my lord, it will possibly
become clearer to you."
"You speak as if a cruiser had nothing to do but take prizes. If
that is your view, you will permit me to say that you know very
little of the matter. I have handled a sloop, a corvette, and a
frigate, and I have found a great variety of duties in each of them.
I have had to avoid the enemy's battleships and to fight his
cruisers. I have had to chase and capture his privateers, and to
cut them out when they run under his batteries. I have had to
engage his forts, to take my men ashore, and to destroy his guns and
his signal stations. All this, with convoying, reconnoitring, and
risking one's own ship in order to gain a knowledge of the enemy's
movements, comes under the duties of the commander of a cruiser. I
make bold to say that the man who can carry these objects out with
success has deserved better of the country than the officer of a
battleship, tacking from Ushant to the Black Rocks and back again
until she builds up a reef with her beef-bones."
"Sir," said the angry old sailor, "such an officer is at least in no
danger of being mistaken for a privateersman."
"I am surprised, Captain Bulkeley," Cochran retorted hotly, "that
you should venture to couple the names of privateersman and King's
officer."
There was mischief brewing among these hot-headed, short-spoken
salts, but Captain Foley changed the subject to discuss the new
ships which were being built in the French ports. It was of
interest to me to hear these men, who were spending their lives in
fighting against our neighbours, discussing their character and
ways. You cannot conceive--you who live in times of peace and
charity--how fierce the hatred was in England at that time against
the French, and above all against their great leader. It was more
than a mere prejudice or dislike. It was a deep, aggressive
loathing of which you may even now form some conception if you
examine the papers or caricatures of the day. The word "Frenchman"
was hardly spoken without "rascal" or "scoundrel" slipping in before
it. In all ranks of life and in every part of the country the
feeling was the same. Even the Jacks aboard our ships fought with a
viciousness against a French vessel which they would never show to
Dane, Dutchman, or Spaniard.
If you ask me now, after fifty years, why it was that there should
have been this virulent feeling against them, so foreign to the
easy-going and tolerant British nature, I would confess that I think
the real reason was fear. Not fear of them individually, of course-
-our foulest detractors have never called us faint-hearted--but fear
of their star, fear of their future, fear of the subtle brain whose
plans always seemed to go aright, and of the heavy hand which had
struck nation after nation to the ground. We were but a small
country, with a population which, when the war began, was not much
more than half that of France. And then, France had increased by
leaps and bounds, reaching out to the north into Belgium and
Holland, and to the south into Italy, whilst we were weakened by
deep-lying disaffection among both Catholics and Presbyterians in
Ireland. The danger was imminent and plain to the least thoughtful.
One could not walk the Kent coast without seeing the beacons heaped
up to tell the country of the enemy's landing, and if the sun were
shining on the uplands near Boulogne, one might catch the flash of
its gleam upon the bayonets of manoeuvring veterans. No wonder that
a fear of the French power lay deeply in the hearts of the most
gallant men, and that fear should, as it always does, beget a bitter
and rancorous hatred.
The seamen did not speak kindly then of their recent enemies. Their
hearts loathed them, and in the fashion of our country their lips
said what the heart felt. Of the French officers they could not
have spoken with more chivalry, as of worthy foemen, but the nation
was an abomination to them. The older men had fought against them
in the American War, they had fought again for the last ten years,
and the dearest wish of their hearts seemed to be that they might be
called upon to do the same for the remainder of their days. Yet if
I was surprised by the virulence of their animosity against the
French, I was even more so to hear how highly they rated them as
antagonists. The long succession of British victories which had
finally made the French take to their ports and resign the struggle
in despair had given all of us the idea that for some reason a
Briton on the water must, in the nature of things, always have the
best of it against a Frenchman. But these men who had done the
fighting did not think so. They were loud in their praise of their
foemen's gallantry, and precise in their reasons for his defeat.
They showed how the officers of the old French Navy had nearly all
been aristocrats. How the Revolution had swept them out of their
ships, and the force been left with insubordinate seamen and no
competent leaders. This ill-directed fleet had been hustled into
port by the pressure of the well-manned and well-commanded British,
who had pinned them there ever since, so that they had never had an
opportunity of learning seamanship. Their harbour drill and their
harbour gunnery had been of no service when sails had to be trimmed
and broadsides fired on the heave of an Atlantic swell. Let one of
their frigates get to sea and have a couple of years' free run in
which the crew might learn their duties, and then it would be a
feather in the cap of a British officer if with a ship of equal
force he could bring down her colours.
Such were the views of these experienced officers, fortified by many
reminiscences and examples of French gallantry, such as the way in
which the crew of the L'Orient had fought her quarter-deck guns when
the main-deck was in a blaze beneath them, and when they must have
known that they were standing over an exploding magazine. The
general hope was that the West Indian expedition since the peace
might have given many of their fleet an ocean training, and that
they might be tempted out into mid-Channel if the war were to break
out afresh. But would it break out afresh? We had spent gigantic
sums and made enormous exertions to curb the power of Napoleon and
to prevent him from becoming the universal despot of Europe. Would
the Government try it again? Or were they appalled by the gigantic
load of debt which must bend the backs of many generations unborn?
Pitt was there, and surely he was not a man to leave his work half
done.
And then suddenly there was a bustle at the door. Amid the grey
swirl of the tobacco-smoke I could catch a glimpse of a blue coat
and gold epaulettes, with a crowd gathering thickly round them,
while a hoarse murmur rose from the group which thickened into a
deep-chested cheer. Every one was on his feet, peering and asking
each other what it might mean. And still the crowd seethed and the
cheering swelled.
"What is it? What has happened?" cried a score of voices.
"Put him up! Hoist him up!" shouted somebody, and an instant later
I saw Captain Troubridge appear above the shoulders of the crowd.
His face was flushed, as if he were in wine, and he was waving what
seemed to be a letter in the air. The cheering died away, and there
was such a hush that I could hear the crackle of the paper in his
hand.
"Great news, gentlemen!" he roared. "Glorious news! Rear-Admiral
Collingwood has directed me to communicate it to you. The French
Ambassador has received his papers to-night. Every ship on the list
is to go into commission. Admiral Cornwallis is ordered out of
Cawsand Bay to cruise off Ushant. A squadron is starting for the
North Sea and another for the Irish Channel."
He may have had more to say, but his audience could wait no longer.
How they shouted and stamped and raved in their delight! Harsh old
flag-officers, grave post-captains, young lieutenants, all were
roaring like schoolboys breaking up for the holidays. There was no
thought now of those manifold and weary grievances to which I had
listened. The foul weather was passed, and the landlocked sea-birds
would be out on the foam once more. The rhythm of "God Save the
King" swelled through the babel, and I heard the old lines sung in a
way that made you forget their bad rhymes and their bald sentiments.
I trust that you will never hear them so sung, with tears upon
rugged cheeks, and catchings of the breath from strong men. Dark
days will have come again before you hear such a song or see such a
sight as that. Let those talk of the phlegm of our countrymen who
have never seen them when the lava crust of restraint is broken, and
when for an instant the strong, enduring fires of the North glow
upon the surface. I saw them then, and if I do not see them now, I
am not so old or so foolish as to doubt that they are there. _
Read next: CHAPTER XIII - LORD NELSON
Read previous: CHAPTER XI - THE FIGHT IN THE COACH-HOUSE
Table of content of Rodney Stone
GO TO TOP OF SCREEN
Post your review
Your review will be placed after the table of content of this book
