THE COFFEE-ROOM OF FLADONG’S.
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.