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 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 Marlborough. To the highest rank he did not belong, but he was divided in kind from the brave, able, disciplined, but shadowy men, who do the regular drilled work of the world. He was a magnificent, rugged individuality. Even in books he is real as only such men as Nelson and Wellington are real. On those who knew him his influence, even if it only produced repulsion, must have been profound. One so open to impressions, and so able to retain them as Marryat, must have been another man all his life for having known and admired Dundonald. It must be remembered, too, that Marryat saw Dundonald at his best—on the deck of his frigate, and not at the Admiralty or the House of Commons, where he was apt to make himself intolerable by his wrong-headed violence in right, and his inability to see that for the work of the reformer, as for all work, there is a proper time, and a fitting manner which must not be mistaken, under penalty of failure.
The influence which Cochrane had upon Marryat might indeed be demonstrated from his works. The captain of the Impérieuse remained his type of what a British officer ought to be. All his frigates’ captains who are mentioned for honour have something—and several of them have much—of his first commander in them. That this should be the case in “Frank Mildmay,” the first of his books, and to some extent an autobiography, was almost a matter of course. In this book the cruise of the frigate on the coast of Spain is the very service of the Impérieuse. But it is equally true of Captain Savage of the Diomede in “Peter Simple,” and of Captain M—— of the “King’s Own.” Both are Scotchmen, penniless gentlemen of good descent, officers of boundless skill, daring, and withal judgment. It is on this last quality that Marryat dwells by preference, and it is 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 despatch ought to be written in a “concatenation accordingly.” It would seem that Marryat had little admiration for the brainless, headlong courage which rushes madly at whatever happens to be in front of its weapon. He would have condemned even with contempt (and Hawke, Nelson, Cochrane, would have condemned with him) such a piece of frantic swash-bucklery as the last fight of the Revenge. The men who were daring with judgment, who risked for a reason, who took care to cover themselves as they lunged, and who then went all together, sword, hand, and foot, with the speed of lightning, and with unerring accuracy of the eye which has brains behind it, were his heroes. In any case Marryat would have arrived at these conclusions, but he assuredly did so the sooner, and the more heartily, because for three years he fought under a fighter of this stamp.
Marryat was fortunate in his messmates as well as in his captain. A crack frigate of those days had the pick of the lieutenants’ list, and of the “young gentlemen” 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 Marryat met comrades who were good fellows, and gentlemen too. He formed friendships which lasted through life, particularly with Lord Napier, and with Houston Stewart.
I have thought it well to dwell at some length on Marryat’s entry into the service, because its conditions are of vital importance in his life. Whatever his training had been he would have been a writer. His private log shows that from the beginning he found pleasure in the use of his pen; but had he not been a naval officer 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 Impérieuse he was able to live his life to the full. There he had three years of active and daring fighting. The impression they made on him was never effaced, and has been recorded by himself. In the private log, quoted by his daughter, he sums up his memories in words which it would be a dereliction of duty not to quote:
“The cruises of the Impérieuse were periods of continued excitement, from the hour in which she hove up her anchor till she dropped it again in port: the day that passed without a shot being fired in anger, was with us a blank day: the boats were hardly secured on the booms than they were cast loose and out again; the yard and stay tackles were for ever hoisting up and lowering down. The expedition with which parties were formed for service; the rapidity of the 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 into our faces that years could not remove it; the proved character of every man and officer on board, the implicit trust and adoration we felt for our commander; the ludicrous situations which would occur in the extremest danger and create mirth when death was staring you in the face, the hair-breadth escapes, and the indifference to life shown by all—when memory sweeps along these years of excitement even now, my pulse beats more quickly with the reminiscence.”
The years of service which thus impressed themselves on Marryat’s memory may be divided into three periods. First, a cruise on the coast of France from Ushant to the mouth of the Gironde; then a longer period of active work in the Mediterranean; and finally, a return to the ocean, and the action in the Basque Roads. The young midshipman’s first actual experience of cruising was one which was doubtless present in his mind when he wrote the song whereof the chorus tells how “Poll put her arms akimbo,” and said, “Port 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 zealous in enforcing the Admiralty’s orders to despatch ships to sea smartly. The orders came down for the Impérieuse to go to sea, and the Admiral would have them obeyed. Go she must—“The moment the rudder—which was being hung—would steer the ship,” as Dundonald says in his Autobiography, and while she had “a lighter full of provisions on one side, a second with ordnance stores on the other, and a third filled with gunpowder towing astern.” But the tale should be told in Marryat’s words, and not in his captain’s:
“The Impérieuse sailed; the Admiral of the port was one who would be obeyed, but would not listen always to reason or common sense. The signal for sailing was enforced by gun after gun; the anchor was hove up, and, with all her stores on deck, her guns not even mounted, in a state of confusion unparalleled from her being obliged to hoist in faster than it was possible she could stow away, she was driven out of harbour to encounter a heavy gale. A few hours more would have enabled
