“We have taken and destroyed all the Spanish ships and vessels which were upon the coast, as per margin.
“I am, etc.,
“George Walton.
“Canterbury, off Syracusa, August 16, 1718.
“One of 60 guns, one of 54, one of 40, one of 24—taken; one of 54, two of 40, one of 30 guns, with a fireship and two bomb vessels—burnt.”
As a fact, unfortunately, Captain Walton’s “dispatch” was written in quite another way. The captain of the Canterbury really sent the admiral a letter of two pages. What is passed off as his whole “dispatch,” is actually only the concluding sentence of the letter, excerpted and dressed up. An unscrupulous admiralty official, for the purposes of a book on the campaign, manipulated the letter and printed its last paragraph by itself as the entire despatch. Historians following one another have since then simply copied Secretary Corbett.
Our first Sandwich broke the French line at the battle of La Hogue, and lost her gallant captain in doing it. Another bore Rodney’s flag in five battles—two with the Spaniards and three with the French—and was at the first relief of Gibraltar during the Great Siege. Our first Dover was present at the taking of Jamaica. Another won fame as Captain Cloudesley Shovell’s ship. Commodore Trunnion served on board another Dover, if Smollett spoke by the card in making him express a wish to be buried “in the red jacket which I wore when I boarded the Renummy.” Apart from the taking of Louis the Fifteenth’s frigate Renommée, if we count in other French and Spanish frigates and privateers taken, our various Dovers, in their time, must have brought home captured flags enough to deck the town out from end to end. All, of course, have long since rotted out of existence. People in old times set little store by such trophies. “What are you going to do with all these flags?” a friend once asked of a frigate captain who, in his barge, gaily decorated from bows to stern with the colours of ships taken during the commission, was being pulled in from Spithead to land at the old Sally Port, Portsmouth. “Do with them?” came the reply. “Why, take ’em home and hang ’em on the trees round father’s garden.”
It was a Chatham whose twenty-four pounders, one May morning, just a hundred and forty-eight years ago, gave the Royal Navy our first, and the original, “Saucy” Arethusa. One Maidstone fought with Blake at Santa Cruz de Teneriffe. Another, acting as “guide of the fleet,” led Hawke to victory on that stormy November afternoon among the reefs of Quiberon Bay, which the French Navy, pillorying the memory of its unfortunate admiral, has ever since called “la journée de M. Conflans.”
A Greenwich fought at La Hogue, and was one of Benbow’s squadron in his last fight. One Deptford was also at La Hogue, and another with Byng off Minorca, where the Deptford, at any rate, did her duty. A Romney, in Queen Anne’s war, after a career of distinction, went down with all on board to westward of St. Agnes, Scilly, on the night of the catastrophe to Sir Cloudesley Shovell. Rochester, and Medway, and Sheerness, are also man-of-war names that have attaching to them interesting memories of the fighting days of old, as have too, in one way or other, in differing degrees, the remaining names of the group, Woolwich and Faversham, Eltham and Deal Castle, Margate, Queenborough, and Folkestone.