“My choice little crew,” as Captain Petre called them, were perfectly prepared to receive their enemies, and harassed them with pikes and cutlasses as they struggled up the boarding nettings. The numbers of the French were so great, however, that they would doubtless have overpowered the Cornishmen in the end, had not Captain Petre, noticing that the enemy had omitted to cast out grapplings, so that nothing but the direction of the Privateer’s helm kept the ships together, ordered his best marksman to shoot the steersman.
As the man fell, and the tiller swung round, another ran forward and jammed it into the necessary position, but he had hardly done so when he too fell across his comrade’s body. There was a moment’s hesitation before another man sprang to seize the helm, and in that moment the vessels parted.
It was then an easy matter to dispose of the few Frenchmen who had made good their footing on the Packet. As the Privateer sheered off, the Falmouth men clutched at the colours flying from her maingaff, and tore away the greater part of them. “I regret,” said Captain Petre, with pardonable triumph, when on his return to England he forwarded this trophy to the Postmaster General, “I regret that they had hold of nothing stronger.” Perhaps he did, but looking at the relative force of the two vessels it can scarcely be supposed that My Lords with their higher responsibility shared his regret.
In September, Captain Anthony, whose successful actions in the “Cornwallis” have been described above, fought the Privateer “La Duquesne” of twelve guns for over two hours at close quarters, and beat her off at last with the loss of two men killed and two wounded; while in November, Captain John Bull had the misfortune to be captured, after a very gallant resistance, by “La Josephine,” a French brigantine carrying fourteen 24–pounders and sixty-eight men.
CHAPTER X.
THE MUTINY AT FALMOUTH.
For some years My Lords the Postmaster General had found an ever growing source of satisfaction in the conduct of their Packets in face of the enemy. There was abundant credit to be had out of controlling a body of officers who went into action with the spirit of Captain Anthony, Captain Rogers, or Mr. James. The navy itself could have produced no better seamen or more gallant officers: yet, just as the navy was tainted here and there with mutiny, so the sailors of the Post-Office Service broke out occasionally in revolt, which was the more difficult to quell since the men were not subject to the provisions of the Mutiny Act.
The source of the disturbances, which occurred at Falmouth in the year 1810, is to be found in the suppression of the private trade, of which a description was given in a former chapter of this work. From that suppression the Lisbon Packets had been exempted; and this preferential treatment of that section of the Service which in other ways enjoyed the greatest opportunities of profit, naturally increased the feeling of injustice which rankled in the minds of the men employed on the West India boats.
It was long before the sailors could believe that their little opportunities of making profit were at an end. “The Government has been obliged to prohibit trade,” they argued among themselves, “but they will wink at it all the same.” And so the men laid our their savings on boots and cheeses just as before, fancying that the “searcher,” the newly appointed officer who was to examine every Packet before she proceeded to sea, would be conveniently blind, that the whole search was to be a farce, and that all they were asked to do was not to flourish their cheeses in the searcher’s face, but bring them up the side disguised as bedding, or hidden in their sea-chests.
At first this answered well enough, for the searcher had to gain his experience, and some time elapsed before he was a match for the seamen in wiliness. At last, however, he gained ground upon them, and the following list of goods turned out of the “Townshend” will be read with admiration of the cunning which could bring so many and such bulky articles on board and secrete them in the face of the officers and in defiance of their commands: eleven loose cheeses; two baskets of cheese; three large bundles of dried ling; four hogsheads of potatoes; six bales of dry goods; three boxes of the same; three bags of shoes; a large quantity of shoes secreted loose in different places. The major part of these articles was turned out of the sailor’s hammocks, some few came out of the boatswain’s cabin; but with one consent all the men professed the greatest astonishment on seeing them. The boatswain was confident that the sailors must have put them in his cabin; the sailors themselves could offer no explanation at all, but were indignant at the mere suspicion of having had any hand in the affair. The searcher was perplexed. The Inspector of Packets wanted to make each man declare on oath whether he had or had not brought the goods on board; but Lord Auckland, with his usual good sense, declined to “place a whole ship’s company in the alternative between worldly ruin and a perjury,” and so the affair remained one of those insoluble mysteries which occur in the experience of every public department.
The goods which were nobody’s property were sent on shore before the “Townshend” sailed, and doubtless were reclaimed by their original owners, so that, though the seamen lost their chance of profit, they incurred no actual loss. Possibly this is the reason why the seizure made so small an impression on the Service. If the goods had been confiscated, the searcher’s duties might have been less arduous; but, as it was, he found it necessary to report a few months later, that only four Packets out of the entire number employed on the Falmouth Station had not been detected in breaking the rule. It seemed impossible to teach the men that the new rule was intended seriously; and many a brave fellow, who had fancied foolishly enough that he would be exempted, or that he could evade the searcher, had the mortification of seeing the boots and cheeses which he had bought out of his scanty savings swimming in the harbour, or tossed unceremoniously into the first boat which came alongside, to be landed on the quay, where they would be at the mercy of any chance Autolycus.