Then follows a significant note, “I was not gone out of the towne of Brighthelmstone twoe houres but soldiers came thither to search for a tall black man 6 foot and 4 inches high.”
Accounts vary as to whether the King actually came to Shoreham at all. By some it is thought that the day or two previous to his coming to an inn at Brighton were spent at Ovingdean at the house of a Mr Mansell about three miles from Brighton, or what is now Kemp Town.
That the King did not always, after his Restoration, remember those who had been of service to him during the period of his adversity is proved by the story that even Tattersall was forgotten. The old seaman took a curious way of reminding his Sovereign of his neglect. He sailed the boat in which he had carried Charles to Fécamp up the Thames and moored it off Whitehall. The hint was taken. Charles directed that the brig should be taken into the Royal Navy as a fifth-rate ship of war, and renamed her the Royal Escape. Tattersall himself was duly appointed captain with a substantial salary, and a pension in addition of £100 per annum, an amount equal in value to about £380 of present-day money. This was also for several generations paid to Tattersall’s descendants.
An ivy-clad cottage on Southwick Green is still pointed out as that in which Charles slept on the night before his escape to France. It is known as King Charles’s Cottage, but how far tradition is to be relied upon in this instance we are unable positively to assert.
Shoreham harbour formerly was of much greater area than nowadays, when, as one writer puts it, “Nature has been too kind to Shoreham folk by giving them too much land, by taking from them most all the water save that which lies in the channel of the Adur.” In former times, indeed, Shoreham had some reputation for the building of fast-sailing luggers and other craft, many of which, in the last half of the eighteenth and early years of the nineteenth centuries, were engaged in smuggling ventures and privateering.
And who could blame the descendants of the men who suffered so much in early times from the attacks of their neighbours across Channel if they profited by the purchase of their goods in the shape of cognac and lace, or, at a pinch, helped themselves without purchase when the two countries found themselves at war?
LOW TIDE AT LITTLEHAMPTON
Shoreham privateers were not a whit less skilfully handled and bravely fought than those sailing out of larger and more famous ports of the west country. The town, in Armada times, had furnished a fair share of ships and men with which to fight the Spanish Dons, and the spirit which animated the local seamen of the Elizabethan age was not “dead bones” in those of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, as is shown by the extraordinary exploits of a certain Captain Gyffard. He was an enterprising man this Captain Gyffard, who when he was ashore (which was not, we are told, very often) had his anchorage at West Blatchington, while he did his seafaring and fitting out at Shoreham. That he was a man of great ambitions we gather from the fact that he had a scheme by which the then Duke of Buckingham was to finance him, and share the spoil. There appeared something dangerously like piracy in the detailed scheme of the worthy captain, and the Duke failed his man. But Captain Gyffard found money and men, and after all many a goodly prize was towed by him into Shoreham.
Another worthy of the town, a certain Captain Scrass, had less nicety of judgement regarding the right of others than we could have liked. One day, whilst cruising in search of plunder aboard his ship, the Dolphin, he espied a Dutch man-o’-war standing up Channel with a prize in tow, which proved to be a Swansea barque. Scrass gallantly went to the rescue, recaptured the Welsh ship and promptly set sail, and towed her in triumph to Shoreham; but, mark you, as his own prize! Poor Powell, her master, was in dire distress, but, notwithstanding his arguments and appeals, Scrass “froze on to his prize,” and refused to give her up, and even her dispossessed captain’s appeals to the Admiralty, made over and over again, had no effect, and he never appears to have received either justice or satisfaction.