Life of Frederick Marryat

date at which he joined the service, and under the command of one the most brilliant of naval officers. In 1806 the war of fleets was over. Trafalgar had broken the heart of our enemies,

fidence that the French would never come out of Toulon. Their only chance of service was when the French would be decoyed out by some particularly audacious frigate, which[18] was sent in to insult them at the very mouth of their harbour. Then there was a chance that they might be drawn further than they could go back before the in-shore squadron was upon them. But such breaks in the monotony of blockade were rare. For the most part our line-of-battle ships were employed in cruis

eased to send forth cruisers which had necessarily to be pursued and captured. Moreover, there was work to be done upon the enemy's coasts, convoys to be taken, forts to be destroyed, privateers to be cut out. After 1808 we were in alliance with the Spaniards, and there was then

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try, was able to achieve anything so complete, so distinctly what Cortes called a "muy hermosa cosa," a very pretty piece of fighting with a squadron, as Sir William Hoste's little gem of a victory over the French frigates off Lissa. He was not allowed the chance to handle a detachment of ships in independent command. But there was in Dundonald the indefinable something-"those deliveries of a man's self which have no name," that combination of passion and faculty-which makes the man of genius. Whatever he did was done with a burning fire of energy. The fire was not always pure. There was a self-assertion about the man-never base, but always aggressive, a pragmatical Scotch fierceness, a love[20] of hate and scorn, a total inability to keep measure, which can be seen on every page of his Autobiography, and explain why it was that he was always, in our service or out of it, a free lance. He was of the race of Peterborough not of Mar

this which he picks out for special praise in Cochrane. "I must here remark," he says in the private log quoted in Mrs. Ross Church's life, "that I never knew any one so careful of the lives of his ship's company as Lord Cochrane, or any one who calculated so closely the risks attending any expedition. Many of the (sic) most brilliant achievements were performed without loss of a single life, so well did he calculate the chances; and one half the merit which he deserves for what he did accomplish has never been awarded him, merely because in the official despatches there has not been a long list of killed and wounded to please the appetite of the English public." This fondness of the public for a long list of killed and wounded was a favourite subject of half-serious jest with Marryat, and he learnt from others, if not from Cochrane, how a desp

who were to be the captains of the future. The Impérieuse had a particularly good staff, some of them old officers of Cochrane's, and in the midshipman's mess Mar

cer he would have been a very different writer, and, more, had he gone to sea in a less happy way, the misfortune would not have failed to have its effects on him. The tamer life of a line-of-battle ship, the tedium of a small craft engaged on convoy, might have driven him back on shore by mere boredom. On board the Impér

frigate's movements night and day; the hasty sleep snatched at all hours; the waking up at the report of the guns, which seemed the very keynote to the hearts of those on board, the beautiful precision of our fire, obtained by constant practice; the coolness and courage of our captain, inoculating the whole of the ship's company; the suddenness of our attacks, the gathering after the combat, the killed lamented, the wounded almost envied; the powder so burnt int

Admiral, you be--." When the corporal reported to Mr. Vanslyperken that the crew of the revenue cutter were singing this ditty, the outraged commander asked whether it was the Port Admiral at Portsmouth or Plymouth. The officer who was, we may be sure, spoken of by the crew of the Impérieuse on the 17th and succeeding few days of November, 1806, in an equally mutinous fashion, was the Port Admiral at Plymouth. According to the custom of Admirals who did not have to go to sea themselves, this officer was exceeding ze

unter a heavy gale. A few hours more would have enabled her to proceed to sea with security, but they were denied; the consequences were appalling, they might have been fatal. In the general confusion some iron too near the binnacles had attracted the needle of the compasses; the ship was steered out of her course. At midnight, in a heavy gale at the close of November, so dark that you could not distinguish any object, howeve

f Ushant-and was got off with no greater damage than the loss[26] of her false keel. But the escape was a narrow one-the adventure must have shake

ned to, those attacks on abuses in the Admiralty and dockyards which were so uniformly right in substance and wrong in form. It is a pleasing instance of the inability of man to hold the balance even when his own interest is in the scale, that Cochrane never seems to have seen anything wrong in the retention of a fine frigate in port during war in order that her captain (who was drawing full pay all the time) might attend to parliamentary duties in London. Conscious of rec

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immediately to join Lord Collingwood, who was cruising off Palermo. Soon after, the future describer of so many dashing affairs with boats had an opportunity of seeing one. On the 14th of November

an English frigate. Now, as it afterwards was proved, the ship was a Maltese privateer of great celebrity, commanded by the well-known Pasquil Giliano, who had been very successful in his cruises, and, if report spoke truly, for the best of reasons, as he paid very little respect to any colours; in fact, he was a well-known pirate,

no had an idea from the boats being fitted out with iron tholes and grummets, like the French, that they belonged to a ship of that nation. A short parley ensued, at the end of which the captain of the privateer pointed to his boarding nettings triced up, and told them that he

dead, was discovered the unfortunate mistake which had been committed. The privateer was a large vessel, pierced for fourteen guns and mounting ten, and the equality of the combatants, as well as the equality of the loss on both sides, was remarkable. On board of the vessel there had been fifty-two men; with [the] boats fifty-four. The privateer lost Gi

nion between them as to the character of the Maltese Admiralty Court. In this case it not only refused to allow that the King George (Giliano's vessel) was

sians, Italians, Sclavonians ("a set of desperate savages" Cochrane styled them in his despatch), must have introduced him to the lawless, and scoundrelly fringe of the great naval war. From privateer to pirate was at all times but a step, and amid the confusion of the g

blockading force. Of course Cochrane seized them, to the wrath of the officer in question, who consistently enough intrigued against him at headquarters. The captain of the Impérieuse was recalled as being too indiscreet, by Lord Collingwood, apparently on the mere complaint of the officer whose passes had been treated with such scant respect, and so lost his one chance of commanding a squadron on work which he was eminently fitted to do well. The story of the passes (which of course were not given for nothing) must have been known to every man on