Cornish Characters and Strange Events

by S. Baring-Gould

Salvation, O! the joyful sound,
'Tis music to our ears.

Whereupon at once the mob took up the chant, sang the hymn, with their strong masculine lungs; the clubs were let fall, and, the hymn ended, they dispersed harmlessly.

James Silk went to sea in the Lady Harriet, a Government packet. On his third voyage to Lisbon he was captured by a French corvette and assigned to prison at Corunna; he was then about ten years old, and the gaoler's daughter of the same age fell in love with him, and softened the rigour of his captivity by bringing him dainties from her father's table. She tried to induce the boy to elope with her, but James had sufficient English common sense not to accept the offer, and finally he was sent to Lisbon, obliged to tramp the whole way, several hundred miles, barefooted, and begging food and a lodging on his way. At Lisbon he was taken on board the Prince of Wales, and returned to England, where his mother induced him to leave the sea, and provided him with a small stationer's and bookseller's shop on the Fish Strand, Falmouth. His mother died in 1804, and when James Silk was aged only nineteen he married Elizabeth Jennings, a farmer's daughter. He got tired of being a shopkeeper and volunteered on board a man-of-war; but on seeing a seaman flogged round the fleet for mutiny, was so disgusted with the sight that he deserted, and started a bookshop at Plymouth Dock. However one of the trustees of his wife's inheritance had speculated with the money in smuggling ventures and lost all, so that J. S. Buckingham became bankrupt. He went to sea again, and was appointed chief officer on board the Titus, bound for Trinidad, Captain Jennings, perhaps a kinsman of his wife.

At the age of twenty-two he became commander of a vessel, and made several voyages to the West Indies and in the Mediterranean. In these latter he rapidly acquired a knowledge of and even fluency in speech in French, Italian, Greek, and Arabic, and this determined him to undertake mercantile life at Malta; but the plague having broken out there in 1818, he was prevented from landing, and resolved to try his fortune at Smyrna, but was unsuccessful. He then went to Alexandria, and thence to Cairo, where he made the acquaintance and gained the esteem of Mahomet Ali, then Pasha of Egypt.

He now formed the scheme of connecting the Red Sea with the Mediterranean by a canal, and for this purpose surveyed the Isthmus of Suez and convinced himself that the cutting of such a waterway was quite feasible, and that such a connection would be of enormous advantage to English trade with India. He laid his plans before Mahomet Ali. "No sooner had the idea of renewing the ancient commerce between India and the Mediterranean by way of the Red Sea taken possession of my mind," wrote Buckingham, "than I began to think how much this would be facilitated by the juncture of the two seas by a navigable canal; and I bent all my thoughts to the object." But Mahomet Ali would not hear of the project. He shrewdly asked, "Whose ships would mostly use the canal?"

"The English vessels assuredly."

"Ah! and then the English would begin to think how nice it would be to have Egypt so as to secure the passage. I am not going to sharpen the knife that would cut my own throat."

The Pasha had a plan of his own; he had purchased two beautiful American brigs then in the harbour of Alexandria, and he proposed arming them and sending them round the Cape of Good Hope into the Red Sea, for he desired to open up a trade with Egypt from India. But Buckingham pointed out to him that he could not do this without great risk of losing them, as the East India Company had supreme command of all the Indian Ocean eastward of the Cape, and would seize and confiscate all vessels found in those seas without their licence, French and Portuguese vessels alone excepted.

James S. Buckingham now ascended the Nile beyond the cataracts to Nubia, but was there seized with ophthalmic blindness. To add to his distress, on his way to Kosseir he was attacked in the desert by a band of mutineers of the army of the Pasha, who plundered and left him entirely naked on the barren waste, many miles from any village, food, or water; and even when he reached Kosseir, he was obliged to retrace his steps, as the vessel which should have conveyed him forward had been seized by the mutineers.