Chapter Three.
I get nominated for a Naval Cadetship.
“‘Sharp’s the word and quick the motion,’ eh, Jack?” said my father, using his favourite phrase, when the post next morning brought him a letter from the Admiralty in an oblong blue envelope, inscribed “On Her Majesty’s Service,” in big letters, stating that I had been nominated to a cadetship in the Royal Navy. “I knew old Charley would be as good as his word!”
“Hurrah!” I shouted, throwing my cap in the air, and forgetting all about a long-promised visit to the Zoological Gardens for which we were just starting, “Now I shall be able to go to sea at last!”
Dad seemed to share my enthusiasm; but my mother, I recollect well, ay, as if it had occurred but yesterday, put her arms round me and cried as if her heart would break.
Presently, when she had somewhat regained her composure, Dad, comforting her with the assurance that she was not going to lose me all at once, it not being probable that I would be drowned or slain or otherwise immolated on the altar of my country immediately on entering the navy, which appeared to be her first conviction, we all began talking the matter over; and then Dad proceeded to read over again the official communication he had received, commenting on the same as he went over it.
“Hullo, Jack!” he observed, on reaching the end of the formal document, “those red-tape chaps a’ Whitehall haven’t given you much time to prepare for your examination!”
The mention of this damped my ardour a bit, I can tell you!
“Oh, I quite forgot that!” I exclaimed lugubriously. “When have I got to go up for exam., Dad?”
“The ‘first Wednesday in August,’ my boy—so says this letter at all events.”
“Good gracious me!” ejaculated my mother, again breaking into our conversation after a brief pause, during which she must have gone through an abstract mental calculation. “Why, that will be barely a month from now, my dear!”
“Precisely, this being the third of July,” replied Dad drily. “So Master Jack will have to stir his stumps if he hopes to pass, for I’m afraid he’s rather shaky in his Euclid.”
“Dear, dear!” said mother, throwing up her arms in consternation, “he is very backward in his history, too! Would you believe it, he couldn’t recollect when Magna Charta was signed on my asking him the date yesterday.”
“Really?” cried Dad, leaning back in his chair, and bursting into a hearty laugh at my mother’s serious face, “I’m sure, my dear, I could not tell you the date off-hand myself at the present moment, not if I were even going to be hanged in default! Jack knows, though, I’d wager, when the glorious battle of Trafalgar was fought; and that concerns a British sailor boy more, I think, than any other event in the whole history of our plucky little island, save perhaps the defeat of the grand Armada. What say you, my boy?”
“Of course, I know the date of the battle of Trafalgar, Dad,” I answered glibly enough, having heard it mentioned too often to have forgotten it in a hurry; and, besides, I knew Southey’s Life of Nelson almost by heart, it being one of my favourite books and ranking in my estimation next to Robinson Crusoe. “It was fought, Dad, on the 21st October 1805.”
“There, mother, just hear that!” cried Dad, chaffingly. “Are you not proud of your boy in blue? By Jove, he’ll set the Thames on fire if he goes on at that rate!”
“I am proud of him; but I do not wish him to fail,” replied mother, who took things generally au serieux; and, turning to me, she said in her earnest way,—“Dear Jack, I’m afraid you are too confident and do not attend to your lessons now as you used to do. Pray, work hard, my dear boy, for my sake!”
“I will, mother dear, I promise you that,” said I, kissing her. “I won’t get plucked if I can help it.”
“That’s right, my brave boy, you cannot say more than that,” chimed in Dad, with a pat of approval on my head, as my mother drew me towards her in mute caress. “By the way, I tell you what I’ll do, Jack. I was asking my old friend Captain Gifford the other day about a good naval tutor for you, and you shall have the assistance of the same ‘crammer’ he had for his boys if I can get hold of him.”
Prior to the year 1858, I may here explain, on a youngster being nominated to a naval cadetship he was appointed to a sea-going ship at once, going afloat there and then without any preliminary examination and the roundabout routine subsequently enjoined, wisely or not, by “My Lords” when the “competition wallah” system came in vogue. Unwittingly I was, thus, one of the first to suffer from the change, the order for cadets having to pass in certain specified subjects on board the Excellent before receiving their appointments having been issued within a comparatively recent period of my getting my nomination.
This proviso, too, I may add, was saddled with the condition that all cadets in future would have to go through a probationary period of three months’ instruction in seamanship in a training-ship, which was set apart for the purpose ere they were supposed to have officially joined “the service,” and become liable to be sent to sea.
These regulations, to make an end of my explanations, continue in force to the present day with very little alteration, the only difference, so far as I can learn, being that youngsters now have to pass a slightly “stiffer” examination than I did on entry, and that they have to remain for two years on probation aboard the Britannia instead of the three months period which was esteemed sufficient for the “sucking Nelsons” of my time in the old Illustrious. She was the predecessor of the more modern training-ship for naval cadets, which turns them out now au fin de siècle, all ready-made, full-blown officers, so to speak; though it is questionable whether they are any the better sailors than Nelson himself, Collingwood amongst the older sea captains, or Hornby and Tryon of a later day. None of these went through a like course of study, and yet they knew how to handle ships and manoeuvre fleets without any such “great advantages” of training!
My moral reflections, though, have little to do with my story, to which I will now return.
The date of the examination being so perilously near, and my studies having become somewhat neglected during the long holiday I had spent in sightseeing in London, my father thought the surer way to secure my passing would be, as he had said, to procure the aid of a good tutor who might peradventure succeed in tuning me up to concert pitch in the short interval allowed me by the patent process of “cramming,” which had come into fashion with the competition craze, more speedily than by any ordinary mode of imparting instruction.
So, in accordance with his promise, Dad called on his friend Captain Gifford the same afternoon in quest of the experienced “coach” or coachman, whom that gentleman had previously recommended, warranted to possess the ability to drive knowledge into my head at a sufficient rate to ensure my “weathering,” the examiners when I went before them; and, ere the close of this memorable week in which I was introduced to Admiral Sir Charles Napier and got my nomination, I was in as high a state of “cram” as any Strasbourg goose destined to contribute his quota to a pâté of fat livers.
“Dear, dear, my poor boy!” as mother said to me, “what a lot you have to learn, to be sure!”
My mother was right you will say when you hear all. I was “a poor boy,” indeed, and no mistake.
Latin, French, Arithmetic and Algebra, not forgetting my old enemy Euclid and his compromising propositions, with a synopsis of English History, and the physical and political geography of the globe, besides a lot of lesser “ologies,” of no interest to anyone save my coach and myself, but all of which were included in the list of subjects laid down by the Admiralty as incumbent for every would-be naval cadet to acquire, were forced into my unfortunate cranium day and night without the slightest cessation.
The only let off I had were a few hours allowed me for sleep and refreshment, my hard task-master, the aforesaid coach, an old Cambridge wrangler, never giving me a moment’s respite, insisting, on the contrary, that he would give me up instead altogether if I once stopped work!
For the time being I lived in a world of facts and figures, breathing nothing but dates and exuding mathematical and other data at almost every pore; so that, by the end of the month I felt myself transformed into a sort of portable human cyclopaedia, containing a heterogeneous mass of information of all kinds, as superficial as it was varied.
The knowledge I acquired in this way, however, was only skin deep, so to to speak, exemplifying the truth of the old adage “lightly come, lightly go;” for albeit this hot-bed process of imparting learning served its turn in enabling me to pass the crucial ordeal to which I was subjected, I verily believe that I could not have answered satisfactorily one tithe of the questions a fortnight after the dreaded examination was over that I then grappled successfully.
But this is anticipating matters.
Hot July sweltered to its close ere my tutor was satisfied with the progress I had made under his care and declared me fit for the fray.
This was on the very last day of the month, and on the following Tuesday, the 3rd of August, I remember, for it was the very day before the fateful Wednesday fixed for examination on board the Excellent, my mother, in company with Dad and myself, bade adieu to the sultry metropolis, of whose stagnant air and blistering pavements, and red-baked bricks and mortar we were all three heartily tired, journeying down to Portsmouth by some out-of-the-way route, all round the south coast, past Brighton and Worthing and Shoreham, which I never afterwards essayed.
Since then, though I have travelled, more often than I care to count now, from London to the famous old seaport which is veritably the nursery of our navy, and whence the immortal Nelson sailed, ninety odd years ago, to thrash the combined French and Spanish fleets at Trafalgar and establish England’s supremacy afloat while ridding the world of the tyranny of Napoleon Buonaparte, not a single incident connected with my first trip thither has escaped my memory.
Yes, I recollect every detail of the journey, from the time of our leaving Waterloo station to our arrival at the terminus at Landport, just without the old fortifications that shut in Portsea and the dockyard, with all its belongings, within a rampart of greenery. The noble elms on the summit of the glacis, are now, alas! all cut down and demolished, but they once afforded a shady walk for miles, making the dirty moats and squalid houses in their rear, which are now also numbered, more happily, amongst the things of the past, look positively picturesque.
I could not forget anything that happened that day; for, then it was that I saw that dear old sea again which I had loved from the time my baby eyes first gazed on it, and which I had not now seen for months.
On reaching “ye ancient and loyale toune,” as Portsmouth was quaintly designated by Queen Bess of virginal memory on the occasion of her visiting the place, our little party, I can well call to mind, put up at the “Keppel’s Head” on the Hard.
This was a hostelry which Dad had been accustomed to patronise when at the naval college in the dockyard learning all about the new principle of steam just then introduced into the service before I was “thought of,” as he said, and, no doubt, the place is as well known to young fellows and old “under the pennant” in these prosaic days of “floating flat-irons and gimcrack fighting machines,” as the “Fountain Inn” in High Street and the “Blue Posts” at Point were to Peter Simple and Mr Midshipman Easy in the early part of the century, when, to quote dear old Dad again, “a ship was a ship, and sailors were seamen and not all stokers and engineers!”
There was no harbour station then, as now, fronting and affronting Hardway; no trace of the hideous railway viaduct shutting out all the foreshore, both of which at present exist in all their respective native uglinesses!
No; for the upper windows of the old hotel commanded a splendid view of the whole of the harbour and the roadstead of Spithead beyond, and I seem to see myself a boy again that August afternoon, looking out over the picturesque scene in glad surprise.
After our early dinner, Dad pointed out to me the various objects of interest; the old Victory, flagship then as she is now again after an interval of thirty years or more, during which time she was supplanted by the Duke of Wellington, which she has in time supplanted once more; the Illustrious, the training-ship for naval cadets, near the mouth of the harbour, where the Saint Vincent is now moored; and the long line of battered old hulks stretching away in the distance up the stream to Fareham Creek, the last examples extant of those “wooden walls of old England” which Dibdin sang and British sailors manned and fought for and defended to the death, sacrificing their lives for “the honour of the flag!”
Yes, I remember the name of every ship that Dad then pointed out to me. I can picture, too, the whole scene, with the tide at the flood and the sunshine shimmering on the water and the old Victory belching out a salute in sharp, rasping reports from the guns of her main deck battery, that darted out their fiery tongues, each in the midst of a round puff ball of smoke in quick succession, first on the port and then on the starboard side, until the proper number of rounds had been fired and a proportionate expenditure of powder effected to satisfy the requirements of naval etiquette for the occasion, when the saluting ceased, as suddenly as it began.
The afternoon wore on apace after this, the sun sinking in the west over Gosport, beyond Priddy’s Hard, amid a wealth of crimson and gold that nearly stretched up to the zenith, lighting up the spars of the ships and making their hulls glow again with a ruddy radiance while touching up the brass-work and metal about them with sparks of flame.
Still, I did not tire of standing there at the window of the old “Keppel’s Head,” looking out on the harbour in front, with the wherries plying to and fro and men-of-war’s boats going off at intervals with belated officers to their respective ships.
Until, by-and-by the Warner lightship, afar out at sea beyond Spithead, and the Nab light beyond her again, could be seen twinkling in the distance, while the moon presently rose in the eastern sky right over Fort Cumberland; and then, all at once, there was a sudden flash, which, coming right in front of me, dazzled my eyes like lightning.
This was followed by a single but very startling “Bang!” that thundered out from the flagship, which, swinging round with the outgoing ebb tide, was now lying almost athwart stream, with her high, square stern gallery overhanging the sloping shore below the hotel, looking as if the old craft had taken the ground and fired the gun that had startled us as a signal of distress—so, at least, with the vivid imagination of boyhood, thought I!
“Goodness gracious me!” exclaimed my mother, almost jumping out of her chair at the unexpected report and making me jump, too, by her hurried movement towards the window where I stood, “what is the matter, Jack?”
“Nothing to be alarmed about, my dear,” said Dad soothingly to her. “It is only the admiral tumbled down the hatchway.”
“Dear, dear,” replied poor mother in a voice full of the deepest sympathy, “I hope the old gentleman has not hurt himself much. He must have fallen rather heavily!”
Dad roared with laughter at her innocent mistake.
“You’ll kill me some day, I think, my dear,” said he when he was able to speak, after having his laugh out. “I only used an old nautical expression which you must have heard before, I’m sure. We always say that on board ship when the nine-o’clock gun is fired!”
“Oh!” rejoined mother, a little bit crossly at being made fun of. “I do wish, Frank, you would explain what you mean next time beforehand, instead of puzzling people with your old sailor talk, which nobody can understand!”
“Humph!” said Dad; but, presently, I saw mother put out her hand and tenderly touch him on the shoulder, as if to tell him that her temporary tiff had been dispelled, like the smoke from the discharge of the Victory’s last gun, whereat I could hear him whisper under his breath as he kissed her cheek softly, “All’s well that ends well, my dear!”