‘D’ye mind me! a sailor should be, every inch,
All as one as a piece of the ship;’
and for a young man, with a young wife at home, that is impossible. His allegiance is divided; the wife on shore has the biggest share and continually calls for more, till the husband gets a home appointment—a guardo, a coast-guard, or a signal station—pleasant for the time, but fatal to all chance of promotion. No doubt there have been exceptions. It would not be impossible to cite names of officers who married as lieutenants and rose to high rank; but either under peculiar conditions of service, or because the wife has had sufficient strength of mind to prevent her standing in the way of her husband’s profession; possibly even she may have forwarded him in it. Exceptio probat regulam; but Gardner was not one. His direct connection with the service ended with the peace in 1814. It does not appear that he either asked for or wished for any further employment; but spent the rest of his life in a peaceful and contented retirement in the bosom of his family, at Peckham, where he died on 24 September 1846, in his 76th year. He was buried in the churchyard of St. Mary’s, Newington Butts, where a head-stone once marked the site of the grave. But the churchyard has been turned into a pleasure-ground, and the position of the stone or the grave is now unknown.
The ‘Recollections’ which by the kindness of the authors grandsons, Francis William and Henry James Gardner, we are now permitted to print, were written in 1836, and corrected, to some small extent, in later years. We have no information of the sources from which he composed them. He must have had his logs; and we may suppose either that these took the form of journals, or that he had also kept a journal with some regularity. Certainly it is not probable that, without some register, he could have given the lists of his shipmates, correct even—in very many cases—to the Christian names. That their characters and the various highly flavoured anecdotes were matters of memory is more easily believed.
What is, in one sense, the most remarkable thing about the work is the strong literary seasoning which it often betrays. The manuscript is a little volume (fcap. 4to) written on both sides of the paper, in a small neat hand. This, of itself, is evidence that Gardner—leaving school, after six or seven broken years, at the age of twelve—did not consider, or rather was not allowed to consider, his education finished in all branches except in the line of his profession. Of the way in which it was continued, we have no knowledge. It is quite possible that Macbride, the drunken and obscene schoolmaster of the Edgar, may, in his sober intervals, have helped to inspire him with some desire of learning. The educational powers of Pye, the schoolmaster of the Salisbury and of the Barfleur, can scarcely have stretched beyond the working of a lunar. In the Berwick he was shipmates with the Rev. Alexander John Scott—in after years chaplain of the Victory and Nelsons foreign secretary—a man of literary aptitudes, who was ‘always going on shore to make researches after antiquities’ (p. [150]), and Gardner may sometimes have been allowed to accompany him in his rambles.
However this may have been, it is very noteworthy that a tincture of polite learning was shared by many of his messmates. To those whose notions of life afloat are gathered from Roderick Random and other descriptions of the seamy side of the service, it will seem incredible that such should have been the case. We are not here concerned to prove it as a general proposition. It is enough to refer to the particular instances before us—that of Gardner and his messmates. He tells us that Macredie, who was with him in the Edgar, and afterwards in the Barfleur, was ‘an excellent scholar, well acquainted with Greek and Latin, ancient history and mathematics’ (p. [80]), which must mean something, even if we allow a good deal for exaggeration. In the Edgar they were with that disreputable but amiable and talented sinner, Macbride; and it was also in the Edgar that the assumption of Homeric characters was a common sport, in which Macredie figured as Ajax Telamon, Culverhouse as Diomede, and Pringle won the name of ‘Ponderous and Huge’ (pp. [84], 93).
This does not, perhaps, go for very much; but it cannot be lost sight of that, as concerns Gardner, it was accompanied by a readiness to apply quotations from Popes Iliad and from the Aeneid, sometimes in Dryden’s version, sometimes in the original. He was certainly, also, as familiar with Hudibras as ever Alan Quatermain was with The Ingoldsby Legends. Shakespeare he does not seem to have studied; and though it is but a small thing in comparison that he should have read Ossian and A Sentimental Journey, his knowledge of, his familiarity with, Roman history may be allowed as a makeweight, unless indeed—which is quite possible—it was drilled into him by Scott on each separate occasion. Thus, when the Berwick goes to Tunis and Porto Farino, he is reminded of the fate of Regulus (p. [136]); he connects Trapani with the destruction of the Roman fleet under Claudius (p. [137]), and knows that the concluding battle of the first Punic war—the battle which, as Mahan has shown, decided the result of the second Punic war—was fought off the Egades (p. [138]). Incomparably more attention is nowadays paid to the instruction of our youngsters; but we are confident that very few of them could note such things in their journal unless specially coached up in them by a friendly senior.
In this, again, there have been exceptions. Until recently there has probably always been a sprinkling of officers who kept up and increased the knowledge of Latin they brought from Eton or Westminster[[1]] or other schools of classical learning; and Hannay, the novelist, who had a personal acquaintance with gunroom life of sixty years ago, has represented the midshipmen and mates of his day bandying quotations from Horace or Virgil with a freedom which many have thought ridiculous, but which, we must admit, might sometimes be met with. We were told by an officer who served in the Hibernia under the flag of Sir William Parker, that it was easy to fit names to all the principal characters in Hannay’s novelettes; and it may be assumed that what was true for the captains was equally true for the midshipmen.
Such familiarity with the Latin poets was, of course, very exceptional then; it has now, we fancy, entirely dropped out. The Latin which our present youngsters bring into the service must be extremely little, and they have no opportunity of continuing the study of it; and though English history and naval history form part of the curriculum at Osborne and Dartmouth, there is but little inducement to a young officer to read more when he goes afloat. But there are certainly many of our older officers who would say that a sound and intelligent knowledge of history is more likely to be profitable to the average captain or admiral than the most absolute familiarity with the processes of the differential or integral calculus.
A considerable, and what to many will be a most interesting, part of the volume is occupied by lists of names and thumb-nail sketches of character. No attempt has been made to amplify these beyond filling in dates and Christian names [in square brackets] from Navy-lists and Pay-books. More would generally have been impracticable, for most of the names are unknown to history; and where otherwise, anything like full notices would have enormously swelled the volume, without any adequate gain. It has seemed better to add a mere reference to some easily accessible memoir, either in the Dictionary of National Biography (D.N.B.), Charnock’s Biographia Navalis, Marshall’s Royal Naval Biography, or O’Byrne’s Naval Biographical Dictionary; sometimes also to James’s Naval History, Schomberg’s Naval Chronology, or to Beatson’s Naval and Military Memoirs—all books which are quite common, and are or ought to be in every naval library.