On his departure she turned to the wondering young sailors, and to this effect addressed them:—“I perceive, young men, you are from the country, and are strangers in London. I am from the country myself, but I know that man to be a villain. Not long since he stole some articles from this very house, and I am fully assured he will wait for you to get you trepanned; you shall therefore not leave my house this night.”
They accordingly remained her guests till the morning, when she allowed them to depart for their ship; but on offering her compensation for her kindness, she refused to take anything more than was barely sufficient to pay for their moderate refreshments.
“This act of generous friendship,” remarks the writer of the Memoir, “deserves to be recorded on three accounts: first, for the honour of our common nature; secondly, to be contrasted with the villany of the pretended soldier; and thirdly, to illustrate the watchful Providence of God.”
Having delivered their cargo at Limehouse, and taken in ballast, they sailed on their second voyage, to St. Petersburgh, for a cargo of hemp and iron. Here they were unfortunately caught in the formation of ice, with but little expectation of escaping during the winter. But on the 4th of November, a gale from the eastward having broken up the impeding ice, they immediately sailed, and in four days reached Elsinore, where they expected to join convoy for England. All the men-of-war from home, however, having sailed, they joined a fleet of similarly unprotected ships, numbering altogether six-and-twenty sail, and together proceeded for England. About half-way across the German ocean, they proved the advantage of their mutual association for defence, a large cutter privateer having hove in sight, and attacked the rear of the fleet. For a considerable time the enemy’s fire was directed from a respectful distance against the nearest ships, which they, according to their proportion of armament, as actively returned,—so actively, indeed, that, in their ill-provided warlike stores, they soon expended the greater part of their ammunition. The enemy, however, ignorant of this circumstance, and unable to detach any single vessel, kept aloof, probably for the chance of the night; but the night proved dark, and afforded them a screen from the prowler, and they all escaped unscathed into port.
They reached Portsmouth, their new destination, about the middle of December, and delivered their cargo among the naval stores of the King’s Yard.
During the discharging of the cargo, my Father received vexatious abuse, without any provocation on his part, from the chief-mate of the ship, which so annoyed him that, under the impulse of a strongly excited feeling, he had resolved to quit the Jane, and enter on board His Majesty’s ship the Royal George, just then passing them from the graving-dock, where she had been undergoing repairs. But reflecting on something which, in the bustle and confusion amongst her crew as she hauled away, he had observed incongruous with his feelings, he happily paused in his hasty resolve, and ultimately decided on submitting himself to a continuance, though under the constant exposure to like arbitrary annoyance, of the duties of his humble station, with a view to the fulfilment of the engagement he had entered into with the owner of the Jane. And, as estimated by the probability of his being involved in the disaster of that ill-fated ship, had he entered on board of her, the decision appeared to be Providentially guided; for at no long interval after this time it was that the Royal George came to her end so strangely, as to place the catastrophe alone and without parallel, amid the varied and marvellous records of our naval history. The story is well known. She was “careening,” for the purpose of having some caulking of her seams effected, or damage of her copper sheathing repaired, whilst anchored at Spithead, with her lower-deck ports open in all imaginable safety. A sudden squall, whilst the ship swung across the tide, laid her on her beam-ends; the water poured in by the open ports in such force and quantity, that she sunk in less than eight minutes, involving officers, men, and visitors, so generally in the common catastrophe, that out of about 1200 souls, or upward, on board, only 331 escaped alive! The brave Admiral Kempenfelt, an experienced and accomplished navigator, who, through many perils of war and tempest had passed unscathed, suffered among the rest, a fate which, very probably, had been that of my Father, had he carried out his impetuously-formed design. But, with the good hand of God upon him, he escaped the then unimagined peril.
On the laying up of the Jane for the winter, the seamen, as usual, were discharged, and the apprentices sent by a coasting vessel passengers to Whitby. My Father repaired to his country home for the interval of service, until summoned again to London, in the early spring of 1781, to join his ship on her being chartered for a voyage to Riga, for a cargo of deals for the Government.
Section III.—His Progress as a Seaman, with Incidents of Sea-Life.
Entering the sea-service as a profession or business, as an unaided adventurer, my Father felt, and ever acted on the feeling, that, under the blessing of Providence, to which he distinctly looked, he must be the fabricator of his own fortune. To learn his profession, from the very elements of a seaman’s duty to its most manly and skilful perfection; to acquire a knowledge of navigation, of which he had anticipated but little, and to extend that knowledge to the highest style of seamanship,—constituted the scheme and aspiration of his naturally vigorous and enterprising mind.
But in beginning, as a country lad, at the beginning, with nothing of position, or education, or influence, to raise him above the common and ordinary class of learners in the school of maritime practice, he met with no small difficulty in raising himself, as his purpose was to do, in character and pursuits, above his fellows. His habit was—as soon as raw inexperience enabled him to form a habit—to spend his leisure time, when not on watch, aloof from the galley-congregation of idle, and often profane, companions. And instead of following the useless and time-wasting practices of those around him, his habit was, as opportunity offered, to endeavour, by the help of a few appropriate books, to carry out his former humble acquirements in figures into the really practical “working of a day’s work,” and “the keeping of the ship’s reckoning.” Nor, in the ordinary “watch,” did he associate intimately with the general body of the crew, preferring, unless he could find a somewhat like-minded aspirant after a better position, to walk alone on the main-deck or forecastle, holding companionship only with his own thoughts.