Fortune could not have done Marryat a greater kindness than to send him to sea on the quarter-deck of the Impérieuse. She enabled him to share in the most stirring work to be done at the date at which he joined the service, and under the command of one the most brilliant of naval officers. In 1806 the war of fleets was over. Trafalgar had broken the heart of our enemies, and from that time forward their squadrons never even attempted to keep the sea. Napoleon built line-of-battle ships in batches, but only to keep them manned and armed, lying idle in port. The English fleets had so completely established their supremacy, that they used the French roadsteads as familiarly as their own. The blockading squadron off Brest anchored in Douarnenez Bay, in sight of the French lookout, and there repaired their rigging or caulked their seams as coolly as if no enemy’s fleet were in existence, and they did it with perfect impunity. Admiral Smyth has told how audaciously the Mediterranean fleet was wont to anchor off Hyères in the absolute confidence that the French would never come out of Toulon. Their only chance of service was when the French would be decoyed out by some particularly audacious frigate, which[18] was sent in to insult them at the very mouth of their harbour. Then there was a chance that they might be drawn further than they could go back before the in-shore squadron was upon them. But such breaks in the monotony of blockade were rare. For the most part our line-of-battle ships were employed in cruising to and fro, with intervals of harbour—their officers and crews spent their lives in drilling aloft or at the guns, and in keeping decks and metal-work in a condition of faultless cleanliness. That passion for neatness and smartness which has never left the British navy rose to its height in the last years of the Great War, and did indeed sometimes attain to actual mania in the minds of captains and first lieutenants in want of something to employ themselves and their men upon.

There was, however, one class of ship which had a fair chance of active service. The frigates were never, even to the end, reduced to mere patrolling. It was to them indeed that fell all the brilliant fighting in the last ten years or so of the war. The French never altogether ceased to send forth cruisers which had necessarily to be pursued and captured. Moreover, there was work to be done upon the enemy’s coasts, convoys to be taken, forts to be destroyed, privateers to be cut out. After 1808 we were in alliance with the Spaniards, and there was then no want of chances for enterprising officers to distinguish themselves against the French invaders on the coasts, particularly in the Mediterranean. The Mediterranean, including the Adriatic, and the East Indies, were the great theatres of the war until the Americans struck in.

[19]

It was a material addition to his good fortune in being appointed to such a ship, and on such service, that he should have begun under the captain who then commanded the Impérieuse. The novelist who was to give the most living of all pictures of the navy at its greatest time could not possibly have met with a better chief. Lord Cochrane, who is better known as the Earl of Dundonald, was, next to Nelson (the master of them all), that one of the naval officers of the Great War who was most distinctly a man of genius. There were others who were brave, able, honourable gentlemen. In pure seamanship many may have been his equals. In a service which included such men as Blackwood, Hallowell, Willoughby, the Captain Hamilton who cut out the Hermione, Broke of the Shannon, and a hundred other valiant gentlemen, even Dundonald could not hope for a pre-eminence in valour. It may even be allowed that he never, while fighting for his own country, was able to achieve anything so complete, so distinctly what Cortes called a “muy hermosa cosa,” a very pretty piece of fighting 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[20] 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,[21] 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[22] 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[23] 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[24] 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[25] 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 her to proceed to sea with security, but they were denied; 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[26] 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.

[27]

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[28] 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[29] 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[30] 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.