This little boy was splendid. He played me a Machiavellian trick. We had an ass one night as Officer of the Watch, and in the middle watch I was nearly jerked out of my cot by a heavy squall striking the ship. I rushed up on deck (raining torrents) and we got in what was left of the sails, and I came down soaked through and bitterly cold, and on the main deck I met my young friend, the little Midshipman, with a smoking hot bowl of cocoa. I never enjoyed anything more in my life, and I blessed the little boy, but it suddenly occurred to me that he was as dry as a bone. I said: “How is it you are dressed?” He said: “I am Midshipman of the watch.” I said: “The devil you are! How is it you aren’t wet?” “Well, sir,” he said, “I thought I should be best doing my duty by going below and making you a bowl of cocoa.” I felt I had sold myself, like Esau, for a mess of pottage. He was a splendid boy, and he wrote me periodically till he died. He was left a fortune. He was turned out of the Navy for knocking his Captain down. I received a telegram to say that he was ill and delirious and talking of me only, and almost immediately afterwards a telegram came to say he was dead.
Sir Nathaniel Barnaby, the eminent Director of Naval Construction at the Admiralty, was also a great man, but he never had recognition. He was not self-assertive. He was as meek as Moses, and he was a saint. It was he conceived the wonder of the time—the “Inflexible”; and I was her first Captain. He went out in her with me to the Mediterranean. We had an awful gale in the Bay of Biscay. Sir Nathaniel nearly died with sea-sickness. I was cheering him up, and he whispered in reply: “Fools build houses for wise men to live in. Wise men build ships for fools to go in.”
If ever there was a great Christian, he was. After he retired he devoted his whole life to Sunday schools, not only in this country, but in America. There was some great scheme, of which he gave me particulars at the time, of a vast association of all Sunday schools wherever the English tongue is spoken. Perhaps it is in being now—I don’t know; but it was a fine conception that on some specified day throughout the world every child should join in some hymn and prayer for that great idea of John Bright’s—the Commonwealth of Free Nations, all speaking the same grand old English tongue. I was too busy ever to follow that up, as I would have liked to have done, and been his missionary.
A letter which he wrote to me in 1910, and a much earlier note of mine to him, which he enclosed with it, are interesting, and I give them here:
Letter from Sir Nathaniel Barnaby, K.C.B. (formerly Chief Constructor of the Navy) to Lord Fisher.
Moray House,
Lewisham, S.E.
15th January, 1910
My Dear Admiral,
I suppose the enclosed brief note must have been written by you to me over a quarter of a century ago. You were meditating “Dreadnoughts” even then and finding in me the opposition on the ground of “the degradation of our other Ironclads” through the introduction of the “18-knot ‘Nonsuch.’”
I have said to you before that I love a man who knows his own mind, and insists on getting his way. I have therefore no complaint to make.
In a note dated two days earlier I see you say, “Bother the money! if we are all agreed that will be forthcoming.”