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, however close, the Impérieuse dashed upon the rocks between Ushant and the Main. The cry of terror which ran through the lower decks; the grating of the keel as she was forced in; the violence of the shocks which convulsed the frame of the vessel; the hurrying up of the ship’s company without their clothes; and then the enormous waves which again bore her up, and carried her clean over the reef, will never be effaced from my memory.”
The frigate had been carried into a deep pool, and rode the gale out at anchor. When daylight came she was found to be inside instead of outside of Ushant—and was got off with no greater damage than the loss of her false keel. But the escape was a narrow one—the adventure must have shaken Marryat rudely into the life of the sea—and have impressed him deeply with the possible consequence of pig-headedness in pig-headed Port Admirals.
The cruise of the frigate on the French coast was not very fruitful in incident, and early in 1807 she was back in port. There she remained for the greater part of the year, while her captain was fighting the battles of the navy in the House of Commons. A general election took place in the spring, and Cochrane, who had sat already for Honiton, stood with Sir Francis Burdett for Westminster. They were elected, and the captain of the Impérieuse at once began, or rather returned 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 rectitude, he would have treated the suggestion that he also was an abuse with scorn. According to his own version of the story, told in profound good faith, he did his higher duties as member of the House with such efficiency that the Admiralty decided to confine him to the exercise of his profession in future. At the close of the session the Impérieuse was ordered to join Lord Collingwood’s fleet in the Mediterranean, and sailed from Portsmouth on the 12th of September, 1807.
In October, Marryat made his first acquaintance with Malta, and the scenes associated with the immortal memory of Mr. Midshipman Easy. He was not to stay there long, for the Impérieuse left almost 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 (Marryat himself says the 15th), the Impérieuse sighted two vessels under the land of Corsica, and, as it was calm, the boats were ordered out to examine them, under the command of Napier and Fayrer.
“As soon,” it is Marryat who speaks, “as they were within half a mile, the ship hoisted English colours. The sight of these colours, of course, checked the attack; the boats pulled slowly up toward her, and, when within hail, demanded what she was, for, if an English vessel, she could have no objection to be boarded by the boats of 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, and, when he returned to Malta, his hold was full of goods taken out of vessels, which he had burnt that he might not weaken his crew by sending them away; and in an Admiralty Court so notoriously corrupt as that of Malta, inquiries were easily hushed up. Although such was the fact, still it had nothing to do with the present affair.
“When the boats pulled up astern, the captain of the polacre answered that he was a Maltese privateer, but that he would not allow them to come on board; for, although Napier had hailed him in English, and he could perceive the red jackets of the Marines in the boats, Giliano 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 was prepared, and if they attempted to board he should defend himself to the last. Napier replied that he must board, and Giliano leaped from the poop telling him that he must take the consequences. The answer was a cheer and a simultaneous dash of the boats to the vessel’s side.
“A most desperate conflict ensued, perhaps the best contested and the most equally matched on record. In about ten minutes, the captain having fallen, a portion of the crew of the privateer gave way, the remainder fought until they were cut to pieces, and the vessel remained in our possession. And then, when the decks were strewn with the dying and the 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 Giliano, her captain, and fifteen men; on our side we had fifteen men killed and wounded. Fayrer lost for ever the use of his right arm by a musket bullet, and Napier received a very painful wound, and had a very narrow escape—the bullet of Giliano’s pistol grazing his left cheek and passing through his ear, slightly splintering a portion of the bone.”
Marryat’s version of the story does not agree in every detail with Cochrane’s, but in essentials they are at one. Particularly there is no difference of opinion 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 a lawful prize, but it fined the Impérieuse five hundred double sequins. That iniquitous court was one of the many abuses Cochrane had to fight in his life.
Here certainly was an experience likely to be useful to the midshipman who was to record it. The fight was a dashing one—a thing well worth seeing in itself, and besides the King George privateer so-called, but in fact pirate or little better, with her motley crew of Russians, 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 great wars, with the connivance of dishonest Colonial Admiralty Courts, and the tacit consent of some neutrals of little scruple, not a few ruffians were able to flourish—the plundering, murdering, cowardly camp followers, so to speak, of the great regular naval armaments.
From Corsica the Impérieuse went on to Toulon, to report to Lord Collingwood, who was back at his regular blockading station. Thence Cochrane was sent to Malta, and on to the Ionian Islands to command a squadron then engaged in blockading some French frigates in Corfu. Here Cochrane, true to his character, fell out with another abuse. When he arrived on the station, he found that neutral vessels, or even vessels belonging to our enemies, were allowed to trade with the island under cover of passes supplied by the officer commanding the English 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 board the Impérieuse, and, doubtless, the officer who had such a remarkable idea of his duties, went, in the course of time, to the making of Captain Capperbar. Having made one more place too hot to hold him, by hasty action, where a little tact and patience would have enabled him to have his way and to bring the trading naval officer to book, Cochrane was employed cruising to and fro till January, 1808, when he was despatched by Lord Collingwood to the coast of Spain, where he was to have a longer period of active brilliant work.
