We hold it, therefore, to be a fortunate circumstance, favourably influencing our national character, as well as preserving us from many of the calamities that attend on war, that we as a nation have been called upon chiefly to defend ourselves by means of “our wooden walls.”
A more national subject, or one on which there was more evidently a vacant space for a new book, Sir Harris Nicolas could hardly have selected, than this of a history of our Navy from the earliest times down to the period when the Naval History of Mr James commences. Yet the expectations of a reader who sits down to the perusal of such a work should not be too highly raised. Nothing is more glorious than the naval victories which our country has achieved; but few things are more monotonous and wearisome than the description of a series of naval engagements. There is the same repeated account of masts shot away or “badly wounded,” of rigging cut to pieces, sails rent and riddled, and shattered hulls; till the ships, not the men, seem the real combatants, and it appears to be a contest between oak timbers and cannon-balls, between the power of endurance in the wooden fabric and the explosive force of gunpowder. A naval battle is always split into details; if two hostile fleets encounter, no matter of what magnitude, it is still but a multitude of single combats between ship and ship. When we have gone through the incidents of one or two of these tremendous duels, it must require in the historian singular power of narration to induce us to proceed to the final destruction and capture of the rest of the fleet. If any thing could abate the enthusiasm of an Englishman in the naval heroes of his country, it would be the obligation to read a detailed account of the victories they had achieved. Very feeble is the cheer we give for Trafalgar, after reading all we can read of Mr James’s account of the battle.
Not by any means that naval warfare is destitute of its stirring annals, and of adventures which have all the colouring of romance. But the interest of the narrative does not rise with the importance and magnitude of the occasion. It is in the single combat of detached frigates—in the perils and fortunes of the light cruiser, probably some frigate’s tender—that the incident which stirs the blood is most frequently encountered. A little gun-brig, the Speedy, mounting its fourteen four-pounders, and manned by some forty men with a few boys, is cruising in the Mediterranean, cutting up the coasting trade of the Spaniard, who thereupon despatch, from several ports, armed vessels in pursuit of her. One of these, the Gamo, (we are abridging one of Mr James’s narratives) a thirty-two-gun zebec frigate, by means of hanging or closed ports, decoys the Speedy within hail, and then drawing these suddenly up, discovers her heavy battery. Against stratagem let stratagem be first tried. The English captain hoists Danish colours, and parades upon the gangway a man dressed in the costume of a Danish officer, who roars out something which with the Spaniard passes for the Danish language. The Gamo is, however, but half satisfied, and sends her boat with an officer to make more particular inquiries. Him they softly hail before he can well get alongside, and inform—in some other language, we presume, than their Danish—that their brig has lately quitted one of the Barbary ports; reminding him that a nearer visit will subject him and his ship to a long quarantine. This he knows well enough; so, after a few mutual salutations and wavings of the hand, the vessels part company, one glad at having escaped the plague, the other equally glad, one might suppose, at having escaped capture.
But not at all. The officers and men of the English brig had been all impatience to encounter their superior antagonist, and desired nothing better than to try their fourteen four-pounders and their forty men and some boys against the thirty-two long guns of their opponent, and their crew of some three hundred men. Lord Cochrane—for he it was who commanded the Speedy—on learning this disposition of his crew, promised them, if he again fell in with the Spaniard, to give full scope to their wishes. “On the 6th of May, at daylight, the Speedy being close off Barcelona, descried a sail, standing towards her. Chase was given, but owing to light winds it was nearly nine o’clock before the two vessels got within mutual gun-shot. The Speedy soon discovered that the armed zebec, approaching her was her old friend the Gamo. The former, then close under the latter’s lee, tacked and commenced action. After a forty-five minutes’ cannonade, in which the Speedy, with all her manœuvring, could not evade the heavy broadsides of the Gamo, and had sustained in consequence a loss of three seamen killed and five wounded, Lord Cochrane determined to board. With this intent the Speedy ran close along side the Gamo; and the crew of the British vessel, headed by their gallant commander, made a simultaneous rush from every part of her upon the deck of the Spaniard. For about ten minutes the combat was desperate, especially in the waist; but the impetuosity of the assault was irresistible; the Spanish colours were struck, and the Gamo became the prize of the Speedy!”
There is more to interest the imagination in a detail of this comparatively insignificant combat than in the manœuvres and engagement of a whole fleet. They are the episodes in the great war that supply the naval historian with his most stirring narratives. Even the frigate’s tender has a more romantic history than the frigate herself, combining in her solitary cruise all the charms of adventure with all the perils and enterprise of war. Few, we suspect, go steadily through Mr James’s history of the battle of the Nile; and there are few, perhaps, who do not retrace their steps to read a second time his account, succinct and unadorned as it is, of the tender of the Abergavenny. We will indulge our own readers with a portion of it.
“Amongst the many weary hours,” writes Mr James, “to which a naval life is subject, none surely can equal those passed on board a stationary flag-ship; especially in a port where there is a constant egress and regress of cruisers; some sailing forth to seek prizes, others returning with prizes already in their possession. During the whole of 1799 and a great part of 1800 the fifty-four-gun ship Abergavenny, as she lay moored in Port Royal harbour, Jamaica, daily exposed her officers and men to these Tantalusian torments. At length it was suggested that a small tender sent off the east end of the island might acquire for the parent ship some share of the honours that were reaping around her. A thirty-eight-gun frigate’s launch having been obtained, and armed with a swivel in the bow, the next difficulty was to find an officer who, to a willingness, would add the other requisites for so bold and hazardous an enterprise. It was not every man who would like to be cramped up night and day in an open boat, exposed to all kinds of weather, as well as to capture from some of the many pickaroons that infested the coast. An acting lieutenant of the Abergavenny, one on whom nature had conferred an ardent mind,—habit, an indifference about personal comfort,—and eighteen or twenty years of active service an experience in all the duties of his profession, consented to take charge of the cruiser-boat. Mr Michael Fitton soon gave proofs of his fitness for the task he had undertaken; and the crew of the Abergavenny could now and then greet a prize of their own among the many that dropped anchor near them.
“Late in December 1800, Lieutenant Fitton transferred himself and his crew to one of their prizes, a Spanish privateer, a felucca of about fifty tons, mounting one long twelve-pounder on a traversing carriage, with a screw to raise it from the hold when wanted for use. Having embarked on board of her, and stowed as well as he could his crew of forty-four men and officers, Lieutenant Fitton, early in January, sailed out to cruise on the Spanish main.”
After destroying many of the small craft of the enemy which had been committing vexatious depredations on the West Indian commerce, and having suffered much himself from a succession of storms, and refitted his now crazy vessel to the best of his power, “he bore up to Carthagena, intending to coast down the main to Portobello, in the hopes of being able to capture or cut out some vessel that might answer to carry his crew and himself to Jamaica. On the 23d of January, early in the morning, as the tender was hauling round Cape Rosario, a schooner was discovered, to which she immediately gave chase. The schooner, which was the Spanish guarda-costa Santa Maria of six (pierced for ten) long six-pounders, ten swivels, and sixty men, commanded by Don José Corei, a few hours only from Carthagena, bore down to reconnoitre the lugger. As the latter had her gun below, and as many of her men hid from view as the want of a barricade would permit, the former readily approached within gun-shot. Lieutenant Fitton could not resist the opportunity of showing how well his men could handle their twelve-pounder. It was soon raised up, and discharged repeatedly in quick succession, with evident effect.
“After about thirty minutes’ firing with cannon and musketry, the Santa Maria sheered off, and directed her course for the Isle of Varus, evidently with intent to run on shore. Her persevering opponent, with his one gun, stuck close to her, plying her well with shot great and small; but the tender was unable to grapple with the schooner because the latter had the wind. At length the Santa Maria grounded, and Lieutenant Fitton, aware that if the schooner landed her men in the bushes, no attempt of his people would avail, eased off the lugger’s sheets, and ran her also on shore about ten yards from the Santa Maria. The musketry of the latter, as she heeled over, greatly annoyed the tender’s men, who had no barricades to shelter them; but Lieutenant Fitton leaped overboard, and with his sword in his mouth, followed by the greater part of his crew, similarly armed, swam to, boarded, and, after a stout resistance, carried the schooner.
“Four or five that were on the sick list, heedless alike of the doctor’s injunctions and their own feeble state, sprang over the side with their comrades; and one or two of them nearly perished in consequence of their inability to struggle with the waves.