'My lov'd Boscawen dead! 'tis all a lye—
Fame's trumpet sounds "He cannot, shall not die—
At Lagos still triumphant he survives,
And still at Louisbourg immortal lives."'
Gentleman's Magazine, Jan., 1761.
'A great Admiral.'
Pitt.
The foregoing sketch of the history of the Boscawens seemed desirable in order to give the reader some idea of the sources from which Pitt's 'great Admiral' sprang, and to serve as a background to the family picture in which his figure is the most prominent. We have seen that the Boscawens were an ancient, wealthy, and not altogether undistinguished group of Cornishmen; and have noted that their seat had for ages been on the banks of that sylvan river which empties its waters into the once renowned Falmouth Haven. Here Edward Boscawen, third son of the first Viscount, was born on the 19th August, 1711; and, notwithstanding the absence (so far as I am aware) of any published details concerning the childhood and youth of the illustrious sailor, except the fact of his quaint humour in imitating the gestures of an old servant till he himself contracted a constant habit of carrying his head slightly on one side[87]—there can be little doubt, I think, that a good deal of the young sea-dog's leisure was spent on, or in, the Fal, which washes the shores of his ancestral woods and glades. We know, indeed, that he entered the navy whilst very young (when only twelve years old, so Campbell says), and this suggests the idea that the future 'old Dreadnought' may have found the limits of the sequestered Tregothnan estate and the quiet life led there incompatible with the high spirits which a lad of his quality must undoubtedly have possessed. In other words, we can but believe that he was a born sailor, and that he merited, from the first, another of his sobriquets,—derived from the heroic contempt of danger which he manifested throughout his life—'the brave Boscawen.' He no doubt expected that, in accordance with the practice of a century and a half ago, through family interest he would very shortly obtain his lieutenancy, when an order was suddenly and unexpectedly issued, subjecting all midshipmen to at least six years' service. 'To this order,' Boscawen used to say, 'I owe all my knowledge of seamanship.' At any rate, the new regulation did not change his views, nor prevent many other Cornish youngsters from entering the navy and serving under an officer who was as fond of having them about him as they were of sailing under his command. Amongst such may be named the Hon. George Edgcumbe,[88] afterwards Admiral of the White, who commanded the Lancaster of seventy guns at the famous siege of Louisbourg (of which we shall hear more by-and-by); and Admiral Sir Richard Spry, who commanded a similar ship, the Oxford, on that occasion.
And here it should be remembered how different in many respects is the position of the modern British sailor—true Briton as he still is, and is proving himself to be at Alexandria even whilst I write these lines—from the traditional sailor of Boscawen's days. Now, most of the sailors' work in our steam iron-clads is done on deck or below; but, at the period of which we are about to consider some episodes, the larger proportion—certainly the more difficult—was performed aloft. In weather of all sorts 'there were dead-eyes to turn in, there were chafing gear to look after, reef-points to knot, masts to stay, studding-sail gear to reeve, and the like.' Then the wild excitement of going aloft to shorten sail in stormy weather! The old songs at the reef-tackles, the flapping of the canvas, the springing into the shrouds, and the helter-skelter race for the weather-earing—unless, indeed, the iron-hard pressure of the gale pinned you against the shrouds as if you had been a spread-eagle. In work of this sort the English tars were always pre-eminent, and one can easily believe that the Admiral accordingly had a thoroughly hearty contempt for the unsailor-like character of the French crews. Of one he said he 'never saw so bad a crew on salt water before; there were not twenty men on board who could go aloft.'[89] Those, too, were days not only of rough work, but also of rough-and-ready fighting; and Boscawen's motto, like that of Hawke,[90] his illustrious contemporary and rival, was always, 'Strike.' One night Boscawen's lieutenant came to him, and awoke him, saying that they had fallen in with three ships of the enemy. 'What shall we do?' 'Why, fight 'em, to be sure!' said Boscawen; and, dashing up on deck in his night shirt, he soon compelled the enemy to sheer off. It was from this action that he is said to have acquired the name of Old Dreadnought. On another occasion he took off his wig, and with it stopped a leak in his boat, which was rapidly sinking.
As we have seen, he was the third son of the first Viscount Falmouth, and was called Edward after his grandfather. His grandmother, Jael, was of the fine old Cornish stock of Godolphin, and his mother was Charlotte Godfrey, a niece of the great Duke of Marlborough, not a natural daughter (as Hals says) of James II., by Arabella Churchill, but her eldest daughter, by Colonel Charles Godfrey, Master of the Jewel Office, whom she had subsequently married;—so that he seems to have had royal as well as good fighting blood in his veins, some of which he was destined to shed for his country. I do not know at what date he received his lieutenant's commission; probably it was on being appointed to the Hector in 1732; but on the 12th March, 1737, when not quite twenty-six years old, he was appointed captain of the Leopard, a fourth-rate of fifty guns. On the outbreak of the war with Spain, he was transferred to the Shoreham of twenty guns, and was sent to cruise off Jamaica. Unfortunately, when Admiral Vernon determined, in November, 1740, on attacking Porto Bello (a place which Columbus had discovered and named in 1562, and which had once before succumbed to a British Admiral, Sir Francis Drake, in 1596), the Shoreham was found to be unfit for action; but Boscawen would not be deprived of this chance of seeing some active service, so he sailed as a volunteer, and so far distinguished himself at the easy capture of the place—for the garrison was on a peace footing, and the British lost only seven men—that he was entrusted with the duty of superintending the demolition of the fortifications.
Rejoining the Shoreham, which had now been thoroughly overhauled, we next hear of him, in March, 1740-41, at the siege of Carthagena, the chief port in New Granada, again under Admiral Vernon, who is described as a man of fair abilities, but of harsh overbearing temper;—one of those naval heroes of whom Byron sourly says in his 'Don Juan:'
'They filled their sign-posts then like Wellesley now.'
Here again he gathered laurels, and attracted considerable notice by what Campbell describes as his 'quick-sighted judgment and intrepid valour,' commanding a detachment of 300 sailors and 200 soldiers, and storming a fascine battery on Boca Chica, which had much galled General Wentworth, and held our forces in check.
Campbell thus describes Boscawen's part in the affair, which reminds us of the recent gallant rush on Tel-el-Kebir:[91]