Transcribed from the 1901 Charles Scribner’s Sons edition by David Price,
email ccx074@pglaf.org
MEMOIR
OF
FLEEMING JENKIN
* * * * *
BY
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON
* * * * *
NEW YORK
CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS
1901
PREFACE TO THE AMERICAN EDITION.
ON the death of Fleeming Jenkin, his family and friends determined to
publish a selection of his various papers; by way of introduction, the
following pages were drawn up; and the whole, forming two considerable
volumes, has been issued in England. In the States, it has not been
thought advisable to reproduce the whole; and the memoir appearing alone,
shorn of that other matter which was at once its occasion and its
justification, so large an account of a man so little known may seem to a
stranger out of all proportion. But Jenkin was a man much more
remarkable than the mere bulk or merit of his work approves him. It was
in the world, in the commerce of friendship, by his brave attitude
towards life, by his high moral value and unwearied intellectual effort,
that he struck the minds of his contemporaries. His was an individual
figure, such as authors delight to draw, and all men to read of, in the
pages of a novel. His was a face worth painting for its own sake. If
the sitter shall not seem to have justified the portrait, if Jenkin,
after his death, shall not continue to make new friends, the fault will
be altogether mine.
R. L S.
SARANAC, _Oct._, 1887.
CHAPTER I.
The Jenkins of Stowting—Fleeming’s grandfather—Mrs. Buckner’s
fortune—Fleeming’s father; goes to sea; at St. Helena; meets King Tom;
service in the West Indies; end of his career—The
Campbell-Jacksons—Fleeming’s mother—Fleeming’s uncle John.
IN the reign of Henry VIII., a family of the name of Jenkin, claiming to
come from York, and bearing the arms of Jenkin ap Philip of St. Melans,
are found reputably settled in the county of Kent. Persons of strong
genealogical pinion pass from William Jenkin, Mayor of Folkestone in
1555, to his contemporary ‘John Jenkin, of the Citie of York, Receiver
General of the County,’ and thence, by way of Jenkin ap Philip, to the
proper summit of any Cambrian pedigree—a prince; ‘Guaith Voeth, Lord of
Cardigan,’ the name and style of him. It may suffice, however, for the
present, that these Kentish Jenkins must have undoubtedly derived from
Wales, and being a stock of some efficiency, they struck root and grew to
wealth and consequence in their new home.
Of their consequence we have proof enough in the fact that not only was
William Jenkin (as already mentioned) Mayor of Folkestone in 1555, but no
less than twenty-three times in the succeeding century and a half, a
Jenkin (William, Thomas, Henry, or Robert) sat in the same place of
humble honour. Of their wealth we know that in the reign of Charles I.,
Thomas Jenkin of Eythorne was more than once in the market buying land,
and notably, in 1633, acquired the manor of Stowting Court. This was an
estate of some 320 acres, six miles from Hythe, in the Bailiwick and
Hundred of Stowting, and the Lathe of Shipway, held of the Crown _in
capite_ by the service of six men and a constable to defend the passage
of the sea at Sandgate. It had a chequered history before it fell into
the hands of Thomas of Eythorne, having been sold and given from one to
another—to the Archbishop, to Heringods, to the Burghershes, to Pavelys,
Trivets, Cliffords, Wenlocks, Beauchamps, Nevilles, Kempes, and Clarkes:
a piece of Kentish ground condemned to see new faces and to be no man’s
home. But from 1633 onward it became the anchor of the Jenkin family in
Kent; and though passed on from brother to brother, held in shares
between uncle and nephew, burthened by debts and jointures, and at least
once sold and bought in again, it remains to this day in the hands of the
direct line. It is not my design, nor have I the necessary knowledge, to
give a history of this obscure family. But this is an age when genealogy
has taken a new lease of life, and become for the first time a human
science; so that we no longer study it in quest of the Guaith Voeths, but
to trace out some of the secrets of descent and destiny; and as we study,
we think less of Sir Bernard Burke and more of Mr. Galton. Not only do
our character and talents lie upon the anvil and receive their temper
during generations; but the very plot of our life’s story unfolds itself
on a scale of centuries, and the biography of the man is only an episode
in the epic of the family. From this point of view I ask the reader’s
leave to begin this notice of a remarkable man who was my friend, with
the accession of his great-grandfather, John Jenkin.
This John Jenkin, a grandson of Damaris Kingsley, of the family of
‘Westward Ho!’ was born in 1727, and married Elizabeth, daughter of
Thomas Frewen, of Church House, Northiam. The Jenkins had now been long
enough intermarrying with their Kentish neighbours to be Kentish folk
themselves in all but name; and with the Frewens in particular their
connection is singularly involved. John and his wife were each descended
in the third degree from another Thomas Frewen, Vicar of Northiam, and
brother to Accepted Frewen, Archbishop of York. John’s mother had
married a Frewen for a second husband. And the last complication was to
be added by the Bishop of Chichester’s brother, Charles Buckner,
Vice-Admiral of the White, who was twice married, first to a paternal
cousin of Squire John, and second to Anne, only sister of the Squire’s
wife, and already the widow of another Frewen. The reader must bear Mrs.
Buckner in mind; it was by means of that lady that Fleeming Jenkin began
life as a poor man. Meanwhile, the relationship of any Frewen to any
Jenkin at the end of these evolutions presents a problem almost
insoluble; and we need not wonder if Mrs. John, thus exercised in her
immediate circle, was in her old age ‘a great genealogist of all Sussex
families, and much consulted.’ The names Frewen and Jenkin may almost
seem to have been interchangeable at will; and yet Fate proceeds with
such particularity that it was perhaps on the point of name that the
family was ruined.
The John Jenkins had a family of one daughter and five extravagant and
unpractical sons. The eldest, Stephen, entered the Church and held the
living of Salehurst, where he offered, we may hope, an extreme example of
the clergy of the age. He was a handsome figure of a man; jovial and
jocular; fond of his garden, which produced under his care the finest
fruits of the neighbourhood; and like all the family, very choice in
horses. He drove tandem; like Jehu, furiously. His saddle horse,
Captain (for the names of horses are piously preserved in the family
chronicle which I follow), was trained to break into a gallop as soon as
the vicar’s foot was thrown across its back; nor would the rein be drawn
in the nine miles between Northiam and the Vicarage door. Debt was the
man’s proper element; he used to skulk from arrest in the chancel of his
church; and the speed of Captain may have come sometimes handy. At an
early age this unconventional parson married his cook, and by her he had
two daughters and one son. One of the daughters died unmarried; the
other imitated her father, and married ‘imprudently.’ The son, still
more gallantly continuing the tradition, entered the army, loaded himself
with debt, was forced to sell out, took refuge in the Marines, and was
lost on the Dogger Bank in the war-ship _Minotaur_. If he did not marry
below him, like his father, his sister, and a certain great-uncle
William, it was perhaps because he never married at all.
The second brother, Thomas, who was employed in the General Post-Office,
followed in all material points the example of Stephen, married ‘not very
creditably,’ and spent all the money he could lay his hands on. He died
without issue; as did the fourth brother, John, who was of weak intellect
and feeble health, and the fifth brother, William, whose brief career as
one of Mrs. Buckner’s satellites will fall to be considered later on. So
soon, then, as the _Minotaur_ had struck upon the Dogger Bank, Stowting
and the line of the Jenkin family fell on the shoulders of the third
brother, Charles.
Facility and self-indulgence are the family marks; facility (to judge by
these imprudent marriages) being at once their quality and their defect;
but in the case of Charles, a man of exceptional beauty and sweetness
both of face and disposition, the family fault had quite grown to be a
virtue, and we find him in consequence the drudge and milk-cow of his
relatives. Born in 1766, Charles served at sea in his youth, and smelt
both salt water and powder. The Jenkins had inclined hitherto, as far as
I can make out, to the land service. Stephen’s son had been a soldier;
William (fourth of Stowting) had been an officer of the unhappy
Braddock’s in America, where, by the way, he owned and afterwards sold an
estate on the James River, called, after the parental seat; of which I
should like well to hear if it still bears the name. It was probably by
the influence of Captain Buckner, already connected with the family by
his first marriage, that Charles Jenkin turned his mind in the direction
of the navy; and it was in Buckner’s own ship, the _Prothée_, 64, that
the lad made his only campaign. It was in the days of Rodney’s war, when
the _Prothée_, we read, captured two large privateers to windward of
Barbadoes, and was ‘materially and distinguishedly engaged’ in both the
actions with De Grasse. While at sea Charles kept a journal, and made
strange archaic pilot-book sketches, part plan, part elevation, some of
which survive for the amusement of posterity. He did a good deal of
surveying, so that here we may perhaps lay our finger on the beginning of
Fleeming’s education as an engineer. What is still more strange, among
the relics of the handsome midshipman and his stay in the gun-room of the
_Prothée_, I find a code of signals graphically represented, for all the
world as it would have been done by his grandson.
On the declaration of peace, Charles, because he had suffered from
scurvy, received his mother’s orders to retire; and he was not the man to
refuse a request, far less to disobey a command. Thereupon he turned
farmer, a trade he was to practice on a large scale; and we find him
married to a Miss Schirr, a woman of some fortune, the daughter of a
London merchant. Stephen, the not very reverend, was still alive,
galloping about the country or skulking in his chancel. It does not
appear whether he let or sold the paternal manor to Charles; one or
other, it must have been; and the sailor-farmer settled at Stowting, with
his wife, his mother, his unmarried sister, and his sick brother John.
Out of the six people of whom his nearest family consisted, three were in
his own house, and two others (the horse-leeches, Stephen and Thomas) he
appears to have continued to assist with more amiability than wisdom. He
hunted, belonged to the Yeomanry, owned famous horses, Maggie and Lucy,
the latter coveted by royalty itself. ‘Lord Rokeby, his neighbour,
called him kinsman,’ writes my artless chronicler, ‘and altogether life
was very cheery.’ At Stowting his three sons, John, Charles, and Thomas
Frewen, and his younger daughter, Anna, were all born to him; and the
reader should here be told that it is through the report of this second
Charles (born 1801) that he has been looking on at these confused
passages of family history.
In the year 1805 the ruin of the Jenkins was begun. It was the work of a
fallacious lady already mentioned, Aunt Anne Frewen, a sister of Mrs.
John. Twice married, first to her cousin Charles Frewen, clerk to the
Court of Chancery, Brunswick Herald, and Usher of the Black Rod, and
secondly to Admiral Buckner, she was denied issue in both beds, and being
very rich—she died worth about 60,000_l._, mostly in land—she was in
perpetual quest of an heir. The mirage of this fortune hung before
successive members of the Jenkin family until her death in 1825, when it
dissolved and left the latest Alnaschar face to face with bankruptcy.
The grandniece, Stephen’s daughter, the one who had not ‘married
imprudently,’ appears to have been the first; for she was taken abroad by
the golden aunt, and died in her care at Ghent in 1792. Next she adopted
William, the youngest of the five nephews; took him abroad with her—it
seems as if that were in the formula; was shut up with him in Paris by
the Revolution; brought him back to Windsor, and got him a place in the
King’s Body-Guard, where he attracted the notice of George III. by his
proficiency in German. In 1797, being on guard at St. James’s Palace,
William took a cold which carried him off; and Aunt Anne was once more
left heirless. Lastly, in 1805, perhaps moved by the Admiral, who had a
kindness for his old midshipman, perhaps pleased by the good looks and
the good nature of the man himself, Mrs. Buckner turned her eyes upon
Charles Jenkin. He was not only to be the heir, however, he was to be
the chief hand in a somewhat wild scheme of family farming. Mrs. Jenkin,
the mother, contributed 164 acres of land; Mrs. Buckner, 570, some at
Northiam, some farther off; Charles let one-half of Stowting to a tenant,
and threw the other and various scattered parcels into the common
enterprise; so that the whole farm amounted to near upon a thousand
acres, and was scattered over thirty miles of country. The ex-seaman of
thirty-nine, on whose wisdom and ubiquity the scheme depended, was to
live in the meanwhile without care or fear. He was to check himself in
nothing; his two extravagances, valuable horses and worthless brothers,
were to be indulged in comfort; and whether the year quite paid itself or
not, whether successive years left accumulated savings or only a growing
deficit, the fortune of the golden aunt should in the end repair all.
On this understanding Charles Jenkin transported his family to Church
House, Northiam: Charles the second, then a child of three, among the
number. Through the eyes of the boy we have glimpses of the life that
followed: of Admiral and Mrs. Buckner driving up from Windsor in a coach
and six, two post-horses and their own four; of the house full of
visitors, the great roasts at the fire, the tables in the servants’ hall
laid for thirty or forty for a month together; of the daily press of
neighbours, many of whom, Frewens, Lords, Bishops, Batchellors, and
Dynes, were also kinsfolk; and the parties ‘under the great spreading
chestnuts of the old fore court,’ where the young people danced and made
merry to the music of the village band. Or perhaps, in the depth of
winter, the father would bid young Charles saddle his pony; they would
ride the thirty miles from Northiam to Stowting, with the snow to the
pony’s saddle girths, and be received by the tenants like princes.
This life of delights, with the continual visible comings and goings of
the golden aunt, was well qualified to relax the fibre of the lads.
John, the heir, a yeoman and a fox-hunter, ‘loud and notorious with his
whip and spurs,’ settled down into a kind of Tony Lumpkin, waiting for
the shoes of his father and his aunt. Thomas Frewen, the youngest, is
briefly dismissed as ‘a handsome beau’; but he had the merit or the good
fortune to become a doctor of medicine, so that when the crash came he
was not empty-handed for the war of life. Charles, at the day-school of
Northiam, grew so well acquainted with the rod, that his floggings became
matter of pleasantry and reached the ears of Admiral Buckner. Hereupon
that tall, rough-voiced, formidable uncle entered with the lad into a
covenant: every time that Charles was thrashed he was to pay the Admiral
a penny; everyday that he escaped, the process was to be reversed. ‘I
recollect,’ writes Charles, ‘going crying to my mother to be taken to the
Admiral to pay my debt.’ It would seem by these terms the speculation
was a losing one; yet it is probable it paid indirectly by bringing the
boy under remark. The Admiral was no enemy to dunces; he loved courage,
and Charles, while yet little more than a baby, would ride the great
horse into the pond. Presently it was decided that here was the stuff of
a fine sailor; and at an early period the name of Charles Jenkin was
entered on a ship’s books.
From Northiam he was sent to another school at Boonshill, near Rye, where
the master took ‘infinite delight’ in strapping him. ‘It keeps me warm
and makes you grow,’ he used to say. And the stripes were not altogether
wasted, for the dunce, though still very ‘raw,’ made progress with his
studies. It was known, moreover, that he was going to sea, always a
ground of pre-eminence with schoolboys; and in his case the glory was not
altogether future, it wore a present form when he came driving to Rye
behind four horses in the same carriage with an admiral. ‘I was not a
little proud, you may believe,’ says he.
In 1814, when he was thirteen years of age, he was carried by his father
to Chichester to the Bishop’s Palace. The Bishop had heard from his
brother the Admiral that Charles was likely to do well, and had an order
from Lord Melville for the lad’s admission to the Royal Naval College at
Portsmouth. Both the Bishop and the Admiral patted him on the head and
said, ‘Charles will restore the old family’; by which I gather with some
surprise that, even in these days of open house at Northiam and golden
hope of my aunt’s fortune, the family was supposed to stand in need of
restoration. But the past is apt to look brighter than nature, above all
to those enamoured of their genealogy; and the ravages of Stephen and
Thomas must have always given matter of alarm.
What with the flattery of bishops and admirals, the fine company in which
he found himself at Portsmouth, his visits home, with their gaiety and
greatness of life, his visits to Mrs. Buckner (soon a widow) at Windsor,
where he had a pony kept for him, and visited at Lord Melville’s and Lord
Harcourt’s and the Leveson-Gowers, he began to have ‘bumptious notions,’
and his head was ‘somewhat turned with fine people’; as to some extent it
remained throughout his innocent and honourable life.
In this frame of mind the boy was appointed to the _Conqueror_, Captain
Davie, humorously known as Gentle Johnnie. The captain had earned this
name by his style of discipline, which would have figured well in the
pages of Marryat: ‘Put the prisoner’s head in a bag and give him another
dozen!’ survives as a specimen of his commands; and the men were often
punished twice or thrice in a week. On board the ship of this
disciplinarian, Charles and his father were carried in a billy-boat from
Sheerness in December, 1816: Charles with an outfit suitable to his
pretensions, a twenty-guinea sextant and 120 dollars in silver, which
were ordered into the care of the gunner. ‘The old clerks and mates,’ he
writes, ‘used to laugh and jeer me for joining the ship in a billy-boat,
and when they found I was from Kent, vowed I was an old Kentish smuggler.
This to my pride, you will believe, was not a little offensive.’
The _Conqueror_ carried the flag of Vice-Admiral Plampin, commanding at
the Cape and St. Helena; and at that all-important islet, in July, 1817,
she relieved the flagship of Sir Pulteney Malcolm. Thus it befel that
Charles Jenkin, coming too late for the epic of the French wars, played a
small part in the dreary and disgraceful afterpiece of St. Helena. Life
on the guard-ship was onerous and irksome. The anchor was never lifted,
sail never made, the great guns were silent; none was allowed on shore
except on duty; all day the movements of the imperial captive were
signalled to and fro; all night the boats rowed guard around the
accessible portions of the coast. This prolonged stagnation and petty
watchfulness in what Napoleon himself called that ‘unchristian’ climate,
told cruelly on the health of the ship’s company. In eighteen months,
according to O’Meara, the _Conqueror_ had lost one hundred and ten men
and invalided home one hundred and seven, being more than a third of her
complement. It does not seem that our young midshipman so much as once
set eyes on Bonaparte; and yet in other ways Jenkin was more fortunate
than some of his comrades. He drew in water-colour; not so badly as his
father, yet ill enough; and this art was so rare aboard the _Conqueror_
that even his humble proficiency marked him out and procured him some
alleviations. Admiral Plampin had succeeded Napoleon at the Briars; and
here he had young Jenkin staying with him to make sketches of the
historic house. One of these is before me as I write, and gives a
strange notion of the arts in our old English Navy. Yet it was again as
an artist that the lad was taken for a run to Rio, and apparently for a
second outing in a ten-gun brig. These, and a cruise of six weeks to
windward of the island undertaken by the _Conqueror_ herself in quest of
health, were the only breaks in three years of murderous inaction; and at
the end of that period Jenkin was invalided home, having ‘lost his health
entirely.’
As he left the deck of the guard-ship the historic part of his career
came to an end. For forty-two years he continued to serve his country
obscurely on the seas, sometimes thanked for inconspicuous and honourable
services, but denied any opportunity of serious distinction. He was
first two years in the _Larne_, Captain Tait, hunting pirates and keeping
a watch on the Turkish and Greek squadrons in the Archipelago. Captain
Tait was a favourite with Sir Thomas Maitland, High Commissioner of the
Ionian Islands—King Tom as he was called—who frequently took passage in
the _Larne_. King Tom knew every inch of the Mediterranean, and was a
terror to the officers of the watch. He would come on deck at night; and
with his broad Scotch accent, ‘Well, sir,’ he would say, ‘what depth of
water have ye? Well now, sound; and ye’ll just find so or so many
fathoms,’ as the case might be; and the obnoxious passenger was generally
right. On one occasion, as the ship was going into Corfu, Sir Thomas
came up the hatchway and cast his eyes towards the gallows.
‘Bangham’—Charles Jenkin heard him say to his aide-de-camp, Lord
Bangham—‘where the devil is that other chap? I left four fellows hanging
there; now I can only see three. Mind there is another there to-morrow.’
And sure enough there was another Greek dangling the next day. ‘Captain
Hamilton, of the _Cambrian_, kept the Greeks in order afloat,’ writes my
author, ‘and King Tom ashore.’
From 1823 onward, the chief scene of Charles Jenkin’s activities was in
the West Indies, where he was engaged off and on till 1844, now as a
subaltern, now in a vessel of his own, hunting out pirates, ‘then very
notorious’ in the Leeward Islands, cruising after slavers, or carrying
dollars and provisions for the Government. While yet a midshipman, he
accompanied Mr. Cockburn to Caraccas and had a sight of Bolivar. In the
brigantine _Griffon_, which he commanded in his last years in the West
Indies, he carried aid to Guadeloupe after the earthquake, and twice
earned the thanks of Government: once for an expedition to Nicaragua to
extort, under threat of a blockade, proper apologies and a sum of money
due to certain British merchants; and once during an insurrection in San
Domingo, for the rescue of certain others from a perilous imprisonment
and the recovery of a ‘chest of money’ of which they had been robbed.
Once, on the other hand, he earned his share of public censure. This was
in 1837, when he commanded the _Romney_ lying in the inner harbour of
Havannah. The _Romney_ was in no proper sense a man-of-war; she was a
slave-hulk, the bonded warehouse of the Mixed Slave Commission; where
negroes, captured out of slavers under Spanish colours, were detained
provisionally, till the Commission should decide upon their case and
either set them free or bind them to apprenticeship. To this ship,
already an eye-sore to the authorities, a Cuban slave made his escape.
The position was invidious; on one side were the tradition of the British
flag and the state of public sentiment at home; on the other, the
certainty that if the slave were kept, the _Romney_ would be ordered at
once out of the harbour, and the object of the Mixed Commission
compromised. Without consultation with any other officer, Captain Jenkin
(then lieutenant) returned the man to shore and took the
Captain-General’s receipt. Lord Palmerston approved his course; but the
zealots of the anti-slave trade movement (never to be named without
respect) were much dissatisfied; and thirty-nine years later, the matter
was again canvassed in Parliament, and Lord Palmerston and Captain Jenkin
defended by Admiral Erskine in a letter to the _Times_ (March 13, 1876).
In 1845, while still lieutenant, Charles Jenkin acted as Admiral Pigot’s
flag captain in the Cove of Cork, where there were some thirty pennants;
and about the same time, closed his career by an act of personal bravery.
He had proceeded with his boats to the help of a merchant vessel, whose
cargo of combustibles had taken fire and was smouldering under hatches;
his sailors were in the hold, where the fumes were already heavy, and
Jenkin was on deck directing operations, when he found his orders were no
longer answered from below: he jumped down without hesitation and slung
up several insensible men with his own hand. For this act, he received a
letter from the Lords of the Admiralty expressing a sense of his
gallantry; and pretty soon after was promoted Commander, superseded, and
could never again obtain employment.
In 1828 or 1829, Charles Jenkin was in the same watch with another
midshipman, Robert Colin Campbell Jackson, who introduced him to his
family in Jamaica. The father, the Honourable Robert Jackson, Custos
Rotulorum of Kingston, came of a Yorkshire family, said to be originally
Scotch; and on the mother’s side, counted kinship with some of the
Forbeses. The mother was Susan Campbell, one of the Campbells of
Auchenbreck. Her father Colin, a merchant in Greenock, is said to have
been the heir to both the estate and the baronetcy; he claimed neither,
which casts a doubt upon the fact, but he had pride enough himself, and
taught enough pride to his family, for any station or descent in
Christendom. He had four daughters. One married an Edinburgh writer, as
I have it on a first account—a minister, according to another—a man at
least of reasonable station, but not good enough for the Campbells of
Auchenbreck; and the erring one was instantly discarded. Another married
an actor of the name of Adcock, whom (as I receive the tale) she had seen
acting in a barn; but the phrase should perhaps be regarded rather as a
measure of the family annoyance, than a mirror of the facts. The
marriage was not in itself unhappy; Adcock was a gentleman by birth and
made a good husband; the family reasonably prospered, and one of the
daughters married no less a man than Clarkson Stanfield. But by the
father, and the two remaining Miss Campbells, people of fierce passions
and a truly Highland pride, the derogation was bitterly resented. For
long the sisters lived estranged then, Mrs. Jackson and Mrs. Adcock were
reconciled for a moment, only to quarrel the more fiercely; the name of
Mrs. Adcock was proscribed, nor did it again pass her sister’s lips,
until the morning when she announced: ‘Mary Adcock is dead; I saw her in
her shroud last night.’ Second sight was hereditary in the house; and
sure enough, as I have it reported, on that very night Mrs. Adcock had
passed away. Thus, of the four daughters, two had, according to the
idiotic notions of their friends, disgraced themselves in marriage; the
others supported the honour of the family with a better grace, and
married West Indian magnates of whom, I believe, the world has never
heard and would not care to hear: So strange a thing is this hereditary
pride. Of Mr. Jackson, beyond the fact that he was Fleeming’s
grandfather, I know naught. His wife, as I have said, was a woman of
fierce passions; she would tie her house slaves to the bed and lash them
with her own hand; and her conduct to her wild and down-going sons, was a
mixture of almost insane self-sacrifice and wholly insane violence of
temper. She had three sons and one daughter. Two of the sons went
utterly to ruin, and reduced their mother to poverty. The third went to
India, a slim, delicate lad, and passed so wholly from the knowledge of
his relatives that he was thought to be long dead. Years later, when his
sister was living in Genoa, a red-bearded man of great strength and
stature, tanned by years in India, and his hands covered with barbaric
gems, entered the room unannounced, as she was playing the piano, lifted
her from her seat, and kissed her. It was her brother, suddenly returned
out of a past that was never very clearly understood, with the rank of
general, many strange gems, many cloudy stories of adventure, and next
his heart, the daguerreotype of an Indian prince with whom he had mixed
blood.
The last of this wild family, the daughter, Henrietta Camilla, became the
wife of the midshipman Charles, and the mother of the subject of this
notice, Fleeming Jenkin. She was a woman of parts and courage. Not
beautiful, she had a far higher gift, the art of seeming so; played the
part of a belle in society, while far lovelier women were left
unattended; and up to old age had much of both the exigency and the charm
that mark that character. She drew naturally, for she had no training,
with unusual skill; and it was from her, and not from the two naval
artists, that Fleeming inherited his eye and hand. She played on the
harp and sang with something beyond the talent of an amateur. At the age
of seventeen, she heard Pasta in Paris; flew up in a fire of youthful
enthusiasm; and the next morning, all alone and without introduction,
found her way into the presence of the _prima donna_ and begged for
lessons. Pasta made her sing, kissed her when she had done, and though
she refused to be her mistress, placed her in the hands of a friend. Nor
was this all, for when Pasta returned to Paris, she sent for the girl
(once at least) to test her progress. But Mrs. Jenkin’s talents were not
so remarkable as her fortitude and strength of will; and it was in an art
for which she had no natural taste (the art of literature) that she
appeared before the public. Her novels, though they attained and merited
a certain popularity both in France and England, are a measure only of
her courage. They were a task, not a beloved task; they were written for
money in days of poverty, and they served their end. In the least thing
as well as in the greatest, in every province of life as well as in her
novels, she displayed the same capacity of taking infinite pains, which
descended to her son. When she was about forty (as near as her age was
known) she lost her voice; set herself at once to learn the piano,
working eight hours a day; and attained to such proficiency that her
collaboration in chamber music was courted by professionals. And more
than twenty years later, the old lady might have been seen dauntlessly
beginning the study of Hebrew. This is the more ethereal part of
courage; nor was she wanting in the more material. Once when a
neighbouring groom, a married man, had seduced her maid, Mrs. Jenkin
mounted her horse, rode over to the stable entrance and horsewhipped the
man with her own hand.
How a match came about between this talented and spirited girl and the
young midshipman, is not very I easy to conceive. Charles Jenkin was one
of the finest creatures breathing; loyalty, devotion, simple natural
piety, boyish cheerfulness, tender and manly sentiment in the old sailor
fashion, were in him inherent and inextinguishable either by age,
suffering, or injustice. He looked, as he was, every inch a gentleman;
he must have been everywhere notable, even among handsome men, both for
his face and his gallant bearing; not so much that of a sailor, you would
have said, as like one of those gentle and graceful soldiers that, to
this day, are the most pleasant of Englishmen to see. But though he was
in these ways noble, the dunce scholar of Northiam was to the end no
genius. Upon all points that a man must understand to be a gentleman, to
be upright, gallant, affectionate and dead to self, Captain Jenkin was
more knowing than one among a thousand; outside of that, his mind was
very largely blank. He had indeed a simplicity that came near to
vacancy; and in the first forty years of his married life, this want grew
more accentuated. In both families imprudent marriages had been the
rule; but neither Jenkin nor Campbell had ever entered into a more
unequal union. It was the captain’s good looks, we may suppose, that
gained for him this elevation; and in some ways and for many years of his
life, he had to pay the penalty. His wife, impatient of his incapacity
and surrounded by brilliant friends, used him with a certain contempt.
She was the managing partner; the life was hers, not his; after his
retirement they lived much abroad, where the poor captain, who could
never learn any language but his own, sat in the corner mumchance; and
even his son, carried away by his bright mother, did not recognise for
long the treasures of simple chivalry that lay buried in the heart of his
father. Yet it would be an error to regard this marriage as unfortunate.
It not only lasted long enough to justify itself in a beautiful and
touching epilogue, but it gave to the world the scientific work and what
(while time was) were of far greater value, the delightful qualities of
Fleeming Jenkin. The Kentish-Welsh family, facile, extravagant, generous
to a fault and far from brilliant, had given the father, an extreme
example of its humble virtues. On the other side, the wild, cruel,
proud, and somewhat blackguard stock of the Scotch Campbell-Jacksons, had
put forth, in the person of the mother all its force and courage.
The marriage fell in evil days. In 1823, the bubble of the Golden Aunt’s
inheritance had burst. She died holding the hand of the nephew she had
so wantonly deceived; at the last she drew him down and seemed to bless
him, surely with some remorseful feeling; for when the will was opened,
there was not found so much as the mention of his name. He was deeply in
debt; in debt even to the estate of his deceiver, so that he had to sell
a piece of land to clear himself. ‘My dear boy,’ he said to Charles,
‘there will be nothing left for you. I am a ruined man.’ And here
follows for me the strangest part of this story. From the death of the
treacherous aunt, Charles Jenkin, senior, had still some nine years to
live; it was perhaps too late for him to turn to saving, and perhaps his
affairs were past restoration. But his family at least had all this
while to prepare; they were still young men, and knew what they had to
look for at their father’s death; and yet when that happened in
September, 1831, the heir was still apathetically waiting. Poor John,
the days of his whips and spurs, and Yeomanry dinners, were quite over;
and with that incredible softness of the Jenkin nature, he settled down
for the rest of a long life, into something not far removed above a
peasant. The mill farm at Stowting had been saved out of the wreck; and
here he built himself a house on the Mexican model, and made the two ends
meet with rustic thrift, gathering dung with his own hands upon the road
and not at all abashed at his employment. In dress, voice, and manner,
he fell into mere country plainness; lived without the least care for
appearances, the least regret for the past or discontentment with the
present; and when he came to die, died with Stoic cheerfulness,
announcing that he had had a comfortable time and was yet well pleased to
go. One would think there was little active virtue to be inherited from
such a race; and yet in this same voluntary peasant, the special gift of
Fleeming Jenkin was already half developed. The old man to the end was
perpetually inventing; his strange, ill-spelled, unpunctuated
correspondence is full (when he does not drop into cookery receipts) of
pumps, road engines, steam-diggers, steam-ploughs, and steam-threshing
machines; and I have it on Fleeming’s word that what he did was full of
ingenuity—only, as if by some cross destiny, useless. These
disappointments he not only took with imperturbable good humour, but
rejoiced with a particular relish over his nephew’s success in the same
field. ‘I glory in the professor,’ he wrote to his brother; and to
Fleeming himself, with a touch of simple drollery, ‘I was much pleased
with your lecture, but why did you hit me so hard with Conisure’s’
(connoisseur’s, _quasi_ amateur’s) ‘engineering? Oh, what
presumption!—either of you or _my_self!’ A quaint, pathetic figure, this
of uncle John, with his dung cart and his inventions; and the romantic
fancy of his Mexican house; and his craze about the Lost Tribes which
seemed to the worthy man the key of all perplexities; and his quiet
conscience, looking back on a life not altogether vain, for he was a good
son to his father while his father lived, and when evil days approached,
he had proved himself a cheerful Stoic.
It followed from John’s inertia, that the duty of winding up the estate
fell into the hands of Charles. He managed it with no more skill than
might be expected of a sailor ashore, saved a bare livelihood for John
and nothing for the rest. Eight months later, he married Miss Jackson;
and with her money, bought in some two-thirds of Stowting. In the
beginning of the little family history which I have been following to so
great an extent, the Captain mentions, with a delightful pride: ‘A Court
Baron and Court Leet are regularly held by the Lady of the Manor, Mrs.
Henrietta Camilla Jenkin’; and indeed the pleasure of so describing his
wife, was the most solid benefit of the investment; for the purchase was
heavily encumbered and paid them nothing till some years before their
death. In the meanwhile, the Jackson family also, what with wild sons,
an indulgent mother and the impending emancipation of the slaves, was
moving nearer and nearer to beggary; and thus of two doomed and declining
houses, the subject of this memoir was born, heir to an estate and to no
money, yet with inherited qualities that were to make him known and
loved.