We stopped to coal at Malta and at Gibraltar, and made the best of our way to England under steam and sail. We took three weeks from Sebastopol to Spithead: not a bad time for a liner of those days.
Directly we anchored at Spithead a couple of gun-boats were lashed alongside, and our living freight was soon away to the ringing cheers of our sailors. Again and again this healthy display went on, until the boats were nearly into Portsmouth harbour.
My ship went into harbour, and was soon dismantled and paid off. Shortly after this event my father received a letter from Captain the Honourable Henry Keppel; and I cannot do better than give a copy of it.—
My dear Lord Sandwich—Your son Victor and myself have established a friendship and mutual regard I flatter myself for one another. Should I be appointed to a frigate going to India, how far would it suit you and Lady Sandwich if I were to apply for him. I need not say the pleasure it would afford me to have the little fellow under my care, and I cannot help thinking that nothing is so beneficial to a youngster as the regularity and system established in a man-of-war during a long sea-voyage, and nothing so injurious as the constant harbour work (after the first two years of servitude) of a line-of-battle ship.—Allow me, my dear Lord, to remain, Yours very truly,
Henry Keppel.
How this letter describes the man who wrote it! It is so full of kind solicitude that, I am sure, he thought not of his own interests, but only of the good it would do me to go out on a long commission, and gain a deal of sea experience into the bargain, as he was about to hoist his pennant in a sailing frigate. He knew, also, how the war had kept us mids away from regular study in navigation and other branches of our profession.
H.M.S. ‘Raleigh,’ 50-gun sailing frigate, wrecked off Macao (China), the 14th of April 1857.