“I will, mother dear, I promise you that,” said I, kissing her. “I won’t get plucked if I can help it.”
“That’s right, my brave boy, you cannot say more than that,” chimed in Dad, with a pat of approval on my head, as my mother drew me towards her in mute caress. “By the way, I tell you what I’ll do, Jack. I was asking my old friend Captain Gifford the other day about a good naval tutor for you, and you shall have the assistance of the same ‘crammer’ he had for his boys if I can get hold of him.”
Prior to the year 1858, I may here explain, on a youngster being nominated to a naval cadetship he was appointed to a sea-going ship at once, going afloat there and then without any preliminary examination and the roundabout routine subsequently enjoined, wisely or not, by “My Lords” when the “competition wallah” system came in vogue. Unwittingly I was, thus, one of the first to suffer from the change, the order for cadets having to pass in certain specified subjects on board the Excellent before receiving their appointments having been issued within a comparatively recent period of my getting my nomination.
This proviso, too, I may add, was saddled with the condition that all cadets in future would have to go through a probationary period of three months’ instruction in seamanship in a training-ship, which was set apart for the purpose ere they were supposed to have officially joined “the service,” and become liable to be sent to sea.
These regulations, to make an end of my explanations, continue in force to the present day with very little alteration, the only difference, so far as I can learn, being that youngsters now have to pass a slightly “stiffer” examination than I did on entry, and that they have to remain for two years on probation aboard the Britannia instead of the three months period which was esteemed sufficient for the “sucking Nelsons” of my time in the old Illustrious. She was the predecessor of the more modern training-ship for naval cadets, which turns them out now au fin de siècle, all ready-made, full-blown officers, so to speak; though it is questionable whether they are any the better sailors than Nelson himself, Collingwood amongst the older sea captains, or Hornby and Tryon of a later day. None of these went through a like course of study, and yet they knew how to handle ships and manoeuvre fleets without any such “great advantages” of training!
My moral reflections, though, have little to do with my story, to which I will now return.
The date of the examination being so perilously near, and my studies having become somewhat neglected during the long holiday I had spent in sightseeing in London, my father thought the surer way to secure my passing would be, as he had said, to procure the aid of a good tutor who might peradventure succeed in tuning me up to concert pitch in the short interval allowed me by the patent process of “cramming,” which had come into fashion with the competition craze, more speedily than by any ordinary mode of imparting instruction.
So, in accordance with his promise, Dad called on his friend Captain Gifford the same afternoon in quest of the experienced “coach” or coachman, whom that gentleman had previously recommended, warranted to possess the ability to drive knowledge into my head at a sufficient rate to ensure my “weathering,” the examiners when I went before them; and, ere the close of this memorable week in which I was introduced to Admiral Sir Charles Napier and got my nomination, I was in as high a state of “cram” as any Strasbourg goose destined to contribute his quota to a pâté of fat livers.
“Dear, dear, my poor boy!” as mother said to me, “what a lot you have to learn, to be sure!”
My mother was right you will say when you hear all. I was “a poor boy,” indeed, and no mistake.