Chapter Twenty.
A considerable time had passed after that celebrated 1st of June, and the French had learned to suspect who were to be the masters at sea, whatever they might have thought of their own powers on shore, when a fine new corvette of eighteen guns, the Gannet, was standing across the British Channel on a cruise. Her master and commander was Captain Brine, long first lieutenant of the Ruby. Her first lieutenant was a very gallant officer, Mr Digby; and her second was Sir Henry Elmore, who was glad to go to sea again with his old friend Captain Brine. She had a boatswain, who had not long received his warrant for that rank, Paul Pringle by name; her gunner was Peter Ogle, and her carpenter Abel Bush; while one of her youngest though most active A.B.s was Billy True Blue Freeborn. She had a black cook too. He was not a very good one; but he played the fiddle, and that was considered to make amends for his want of skill.
“For why,” he used to remark, “if my duff hard, I fiddle much; you dance de more, and den de duff go down—what more you want?”
True Blue’s three godfathers had resolved to become warrant-officers if they could, and all had studied hard to pass their examinations, which they did in a very satisfactory way.
Their example was not lost upon True Blue. “I have never been sorry that I am not on the quarterdeck,” said he one day to Paul. “But, godfather, I shall be if I cannot become a boatswain. That’s what I am fitted for, and that’s what my father would have wished me to be, I’m sure.”
“That he would, Billy,” answered Paul. “You see a boatswain’s an officer and wears a uniform; and he’s a seaman, too, so to speak, and that’s what your father wished you to be; and I’ll tell you what, godson, if some of these days, when you’re old enough, you becomes a boatswain, and when the war’s over you goes on shore and marries Mary Ogle, so that you’ll have a home of your own when I am under hatches, that’s all I wishes for you. It’s the happiest lot for any man—a good wife, a snug little cottage, a garden to dig in, with a summer-house to smoke your pipe in, and maybe a berth in the dockyard, just to keep you employed and your legs going, is all a man like you or me can want for, and that is what I hope you may get.”
Some young men would have turned the matter off with a laugh, but True Blue replied, “Ay, godfather, there isn’t such a girl between the North Foreland and the Land’s End so good and so pretty to my mind as Mary Ogle; and that I’ll maintain, let others say what they will.”
“True, boy, true!” cried Paul, slapping him affectionately on the shoulder. “You are right about Mary; and when a lad does like a girl, it’s pleasant to see that he really does like her right heartily and honestly, and isn’t ashamed of saying so.”
The Gannet had altogether a picked crew, and Captain Brine was on the lookout to give them every opportunity of distinguishing themselves. There were, to be sure, some not quite equal to the rest. Tim Fid and Harry Hartland had joined with True Blue, and poor Gregory Gipples had managed still to hang on in the service, though, as his messmates observed, he was more suited to sweep the decks than to set the Thames on fire.
As yet the saucy little Gannet, as her crew delighted to call her, had done nothing particularly to boast of, except capturing and burning a few chasse-marées, looking into various holes and corners of the French coast, exchanging shots with small batteries here and there, and keeping the French coastguard in a very lively and active condition, never knowing when they might receive a nine-pound round-shot in the middle of one of their lookout towers, or be otherwise disturbed in their nocturnal slumbers.