Years later his enterprise again brought him into notice by providing a young ass (whom many will recollect), who had come into £70,000 on attaining his majority, not only with a flat, but completely furnishing it, and then smothering him with bracelets and bangles for personal wear, and trinkets and gimcracks that made him rattle to a greater extent than the historical lady of Banbury Cross.
The sequel was more melodramatic. Within a year the entire £70,000 was gone, within another year the prodigal was in his grave, and, despite the strenuous efforts of an elder brother to recover a trifle from the clutches of a philanthropist, a feather merchant, and dramatic author—all since gathered into Abraham’s bosom—the shekels never changed hands—s’help me—and ’Enery is still one of the most respected Elders in Israel.
It was in ’65 on the island of Ascension, where I happened temporarily to be, that an awful tragedy was on the verge of being investigated by a Court of Inquiry, but it was realised that the terrible Atlantic rollers that perpetrated the cruel deed and the innocent children that were the victims had left no data for the groundwork of the conventional farce.
It was on that dismal rock whose only merits are its strategical coaling position and its inexhaustible supply of turtle that during the season when those insidious rollers of unbroken water, without sound, without warning, suddenly spread over the sandy beach, two or three children of an officer of Marines were suddenly swept off their legs and carried by the back-wash with the velocity of a millstream towards the coral reefs a hundred yards out at sea, where death awaited them.
On the one side an expanse of sand that forthwith resumed its placid, shining surface, on the other a ripple literally bristling with fins of the most voracious species of shark known to naturalists.
In a second it was all over, and the crimson pall that covered the face of the blue Atlantic told all there was to tell of the terrible catastrophe.
The few observation boxes containing niggers on the look-out for turtle had seen nothing, heard nothing; the only eye-witness was the helpless nursemaid, and only because there was nothing to tell was the farce of a “Court of Inquiry” abandoned.
The turtle industry is simplicity itself: so soon as one advances sufficiently inland a couple of niggers rush out and turn her over and lug her into the tank, when her laying days are over, for it is the female only that is captured as she comes to deposit her eggs, and no human eye has ever seen nor any alderman ever guzzled amid the green fat of the male animal.
Ascension is best described as the most God-forsaken spot in creation, except perhaps Aden, to which must be given the palm. Here the naval garrison seem to have grown into a mechanical routine, and only change their monotonous wading through sand by an occasional day’s leave to Green Mountain, on whose summit the only three blades of grass on the island struggle for existence. How these gallant men are chosen for this dreary duty it is difficult to say; no alien princeling attached to the British Navy ever appears to have his turn; and one must assume that “merit tempered with non-interest” is the qualification that controls the roster. Of the turtle there can be no two opinions; in unlimited supplies, two huge tanks, through which the tide ebbs and flows, contain some hundreds of these delectable creatures, delectable only with the aid of the highest embellishments, but the most nauseous sickening of “plats” in the shape of rations. Every man-of-war calling at Ascension is compelled to ship a dozen, which lie for weeks on deck, their heads resting on a swab, and the hose playing on them of a morning, while a stench more insidious than the vapours of a fried-fish shop attaches itself to everything; one’s hair-brush reeks like a turtle fin, and whether one eats, drinks, or smokes, it’s toujours tortue.
During the Ashanti war, Ascension appeared at its best; in its comfortable hospital the wounded from spear and slug, and the dying from West Coast fever, obtained the best of attendance. In it I saw Thompson, of the Inniskilling Dragoons, just brought down from the Prah—one of the most popular men in the Army—die; whilst from it many a brave man has been carried to his last home, and many a sufferer who has entered its portals in apparently the last stage of fever and ague has been pulled round, and put on board with renewed life to return to England to bless the surgeons and curse Ascension.