"We had been sent for in order to protect a fleet of merchantmen that
were bound to the Baltic, and were to sail under the convoy of our ship
and the Countess of Scarborough, commanded by Captain Piercy. And thus
it came about, that, after being twenty-five days in His Majesty's
service, I had the fortune to be present at one of the most severe and
desperate combats that have been fought in our or in any time.
"I shall not attempt to tell that story of the battle of the 23d of
September, which ended in our glorious captain striking his own colors
to our superior and irresistible enemy." (This enemy, as Mr. Thackeray
has just said, is "Monsieur John Paul Jones, afterwards Knight of His
Most Christian Majesty's Order of Merit.") "Sir Richard [Pearson, of the
English frigate Serapis] has told the story of his disaster in words
nobler than any I could supply, who, though indeed engaged in that fatal
action, in which our flag went down before a renegade Briton and his
motley crew, saw but a very small portion of the battle which ended so
fatally for us. It did not commence till nightfall. How well I remember
the sound of the enemy's gun, of which the shot crashed into our side in
reply to the challenge of our captain who hailed her! Then came a
broadside from us,--the first I had ever heard in battle."[G]
Ingham did not speak for a little while. None of us did. And when we
did, it was not to speak of Denis Duval, so much as of the friend we
lost, when we lost the monthly letter, or at least, Roundabout Paper,
from Mr. Thackeray. How much we had prized him,--how strange it was that
there was ever a day when we did not know about him,--how strange it was
that anybody should call him cynical, or think men must apologize for
him:--of such things and of a thousand more we spoke, before we came
back to Denis Duval.
But at last Fausta said,--"What do you mean, Fred, by saying you
remember Denis Duval?"
And I,--"Did you meet him at the Battle of Pavia, or in Valerius
Flaccus's Games in Numidia?" For we have a habit of calling Ingham "The
Wandering Jew."
But he would not be jeered at; he only called us to witness, that, from
the first chapter of Denis Duval, he had said the name was
familiar,--even to the point of looking it out in the Biographical
Dictionary; and now that it appeared Duval fought on board the Serapis,
he said it all came back to him. His grandfather, his mother's father,
was a "volunteer"-boy, preparing to be midshipman, on the Serapis,--and
he knew he had heard him speak of Duval!
Oh, how we all screamed! It was so like Ingham! Haliburton asked him if
his grandfather was not _best-man_ when Denis married Agnes. Fausta
asked him if he would not continue the novel in the "Cornhill." I said
it was well known that the old gentleman advised Montcalm to surrender
Quebec, interpreted between Cook and the first Kamehameha, piloted La
Pérouse between the Centurion and the Graves in Boston harbor, and
called him up with a toast at a school-dinner;--that I did not doubt,
therefore, that it was all right,--and that he and Duval had sworn
eternal friendship in their boyhood, and now formed one constellation in
the southern hemisphere. But after we had all done, Ingham offered to
bet Newport for the Six that he would substantiate what he said. This is
by far the most tremendous wager in our little company; it is never
offered, unless there be certainty to back it; it is, therefore, never
accepted; and the nearest approach we have ever made to Newport, as a
company, was one afternoon when we went to South-Boston Point in the
horse-car, and found the tide down. Silence reigned, therefore, and the
subject changed.
The next night we were at Ingham's. He unlocked a ravishing old black
mahogany secretary he has, and produced a pile of parchment-covered
books of different sizes, which were diaries of old Captain Heddart's.
They were often called log-books,--but, though in later years kept on
paper ruled for log-books, and often following to a certain extent the
indications of the columns, they were almost wholly personal, and
sometimes ran a hundred pages without alluding at all to the ship on
which he wrote. Well! the earliest of these was by far the most elegant
in appearance. My eyes watered a little, as Ingham showed me on the
first page, in the stiff Italian hand which our grandmothers wrote in,
when they aspired to elegance, the dedication,--
"TO MY DEAR FRANCIS,
_who will write something here every day, because he loves his_
MOTHER."
That old English gentleman, whom I just remember, when Ingham first went
to sea, as the model of mild, kind old men, at Ingham's mother's
house,--then he went to sea once himself for the first time,--and he had
a mother himself,--and as he went off, she gave him the best album-book
that Thetford Regis could make,--and wrote this inscription in ink that
was not rusty then!
Well, again! in this book, Ingham, who had been reading it all day, had
put five or six newspaper-marks.