On my delivering this insolent message to Lieutenant Yetts, it put him in a great rage and he swore, damn his brains, but he’d remember Master Ross for his kindness, the first opportunity. This Ross was a satirist, or would be thought so, because he wrote some poem in doggerel rhymes of scurrilous merit, abusing some of the officers of the guard-ships and many of the respectable people of Gosport. He also wrote a play which was damned and hissed off the stage, and some other pieces of the same description. Soon after this it came to our turn to have the guard, and late in the first watch, Lieutenant Yetts sent for me and gave orders that I should go in the cutter and row guard, and if possible get alongside the Barfleur. Away I went round the guard-ships, and left the Barfleur for the last. On rowing ahead I let the boat drop down with the tide and actually got alongside her accommodation ladder without being hailed. It is the duty of a lieutenant to row guard, so I did not think myself justified in boarding her, which I could have done; but remained some time alongside. At last one of the midshipmen (Mr. Holmes) hailed from the gangway, ‘What boat is that?’ upon which I called out as loud as I could hollo, ‘Guard boat!’ and that I had been alongside a considerable time without being hailed—to his great astonishment, as he informed me afterwards. On my telling this to Mr. Yetts, he rubbed his hands and swore that everyone should know how the damned brutes were caught napping.
In the absence of the admiral we, as senior captain, would have the command; and when exercising sails or getting down top gallant yards etc, if the Barfleur only showed a man’s head above deck, up would go her signal to call her men down out of the tops and rigging, and old Yetts would exclaim, ‘Damn my brains, no starting before us; we are masters now.’ Mr. Nowell, our second lieutenant, was a very powerful and active man; and though gloomy and fiery at times, was much the gentleman. He was famous at fencing and jumping, and could, as I have been told, jump across the gateway of Gosport works—about twenty feet. On one occasion he sprained his ankle, when Frost (one of our midshipmen) said in his hearing and mocking the Welsh (Nowell being a Welshman) ‘My vather a tevil of a good shumper, shumped twenty veet, came right down, proke his ankle, could no more shumpy.’ For this the other gave him a look that spoke volumes.
This Frost was a complete Commodore Gale and went by the nickname of Hard Frost. It is related that when his wife died he gave a dinner on the day of her funeral. When the company arrived, Frost was dead drunk; upon which some of the party laid him out, with a leg of mutton under his head for a pillow, and a bunch of turnips under his feet. In the early time of the guard-ships there was a board held by the midshipmen of the Queen, 98, the flagship, where the midshipmen of the other ships used to go to pass their examination for a blackguard. Frost, who belonged to the Pégase, 74, went to pass, and on the occasion showed such transcendent abilities, that the board considered him a wonder, and requested he would take his seat as a member. I could relate many of his sayings, but they had better sink into oblivion.
Our first lieutenant was a devil for scrubbing decks, and in the dead of winter we frequently had to shovel the snow from the quarter deck, and take a spell, about half-past four in the morning, with the holystone and hand organs, while the water would freeze as soon as it was thrown on the deck. The general order, made into rhyme by Flood [was] as follows:
The decks, as usual, to be washed and scrubbed;
And with the holystone severely rubbed.
To show the superstition of sailors I must mention the following anecdote. Not a hundred miles from Portsmouth lived a great nabob, who formerly possessed a large fortune, but from gambling and other bad management had greatly fallen off, and the neighbours used to say he had dealings with the devil, and at night would converse with him in his cellar. We had a raven on board that came from this neighbourhood; and from the number of strange pranks it was in the habit of playing, was supposed by the ship’s company not to have been one of this world; and what strengthened this opinion was Macredie giving it out that he had heard the raven speak, and say that he had been the nabob’s coachman, and should resume his office as soon as the ship was paid off, and he had got some recruits for his master. This made him be looked at with an evil eye by the ship’s company; and one evening when the provisions were serving out and several of the people were in the cockpit about the steward’s room, the raven caught hold of the gunner’s mate by the trowsers, croaking and snapping at his legs. He then flew on the shoulder of the corporal of marines, took off his hat and hid it in the tier. ‘I’m damned,’ says old Phillips, the quartermaster, ‘if he has not marked you for his master.’ He had hardly said this when the raven came hopping back and seized upon the cheese belonging to the quartermaster, and walked off with a large piece of it, the other being afraid to follow.
Another of his tricks I was an eye-witness to. Our sergeant of marines had leave to go on shore, and was on the poop showing a half-guinea to the corporal, saying ‘With this bit of gold I shall take a cruise, it will last as long as I like to stay.’ He was holding the half-guinea between his finger and thumb, and asked the raven, who was on the poop, if he would take a trip with him. Ralph, ever on the watch, in an instant snapped the half-guinea out of his hand, and flew up to the main topmast head and remained more than an hour aloft, the sergeant all the time in the greatest anxiety, and some of the fellows saying to him, ‘Now, don’t you believe he’s the devil?’ At last the raven flew down upon the booms and went into the stern sheets of the barge lying there and hid the half-guinea, which the sergeant found, but swore it was not the same that was taken from him, while several called out ‘Sold! Sold!’[[66]]
I shall now conclude the Edgar after saying a word for Davy Reed, the master. He was what we call a hard officer, as well as a very strange sort of fish, and had the misfortune, like many others, to lose his teeth. I was at dinner in the wardroom when a small parcel was handed in directed for Mr. Reed. ‘What the hell can this be?’ says Davy (who did not like to have sixpence to pay the waterman), ‘and who gave it to you?’ continued he. ‘Sir,’ says the waterman, ‘it was a young lady who sent it off from Common Hard.’ As several tricks had been played with Davy before, he was afraid to open the parcel, and begged of one of the officers at the table to do so for him, but when opened, what was his amazement to find a set of sheep’s teeth for David Reed, Esq., with directions for fixing, and a box of tooth powder that, by the smell, appeared to be a mixture of everything abominable. Poor Davy was in a dreadful rage, and never heard the last of it. The Edgar was paid off in January 1790, and we had a parting dinner at the India Arms, Gosport, and kept it up until twelve that night. With the exception of the half dozen, they were some of the best fellows I ever met with. The Edgar was commissioned immediately after by Captain Anthony James Pye Molloy, and some of the midshipmen rejoined her.