Byron | Page 4

paying his fees, was set at liberty; but he
appears henceforth as a spectre-haunted man, roaming about under
false names, or shut up in the Abbey like a baited savage, shunned by

his fellows high and low, and the centre of the wildest stories. That he
shot a coachman, and flung the body into the carriage beside his wife,
who very sensibly left him; that he tried to drown her; that he had
devils to attend him--were among the many weird legends of "the
wicked lord." The poet himself says that his ancestor's only
companions were the crickets that used to crawl over him, receive
stripes with straws when they misbehaved, and on his death made an
exodus in procession from the house. When at home he spent his time
in pistol-shooting, making sham fights with wooden ships about the
rockeries of the lake, and building ugly turrets on the battlements. He
hated his heir presumptive, sold the estate of Rochdale,--a proceeding
afterwards challenged--and cut down the trees of Newstead, to spite
him; but he survived his three sons, his brother, and his only grandson,
who was killed in Corsica in 1794.
On his own death in 1798, the estates and title passed to George
Gordon, then a child of ten, whom he used to talk of, without a shadow
of interest, as "the little boy who lives at Aberdeen." His sister Isabella
married Lord Carlisle, and became the mother of the fifth Earl, the
poet's nominal guardian. She was a lady distinguished for eccentricity
of manners, and (like her son satirized in the Bards and Reviewers) for
the perpetration of indifferent verses. The career of the fourth lord's
second son, John, the poet's grandfather, recalls that of the sea-kings
from whom the family claim to have sprung. Born in 1723, he at an
early age entered the naval service, and till his death in 1786 was tossed
from storm to storm. "He had no rest on sea, nor I on shore," writes his
illustrious descendant. In 1740 a fleet of five ships was sent out under
Commodore Anson to annoy the Spaniards, with whom we were then
at war, in the South Seas. Byron took service as a midshipman in one of
those ships--all more or less unfortunate--called "The Wager." Being a
bad sailor, and heavily laden, she was blown from her company, and
wrecked in the Straits of Magellan. The majority of the crew were cast
on a bleak rock, which they christened Mount Misery. After
encountering all the horrors of mutiny and famine, and being in various
ways deserted, five of the survivors, among them Captain Cheap and
Mr. Byron, were taken by some Patagonians to the Island of Chiloe,
and thence, after some months, to Valparaiso. They were kept for

nearly two years as prisoners at St. Iago, the capital of Chili, and in
December, 1744, put on board a French frigate, which reached Brest in
October, 1745. Early in 1746 they arrived at Dover in a Dutch vessel.
This voyage is the subject of a well-known apostrophe in The
Pleasures of Hope, beginning--
And such thy strength-inspiring aid that bore The hardy Byron from his
native shore. In torrid climes, where Chiloe's tempests sweep
Tumultuous murmurs o'er the troubled deep, 'Twas his to mourn
misfortune's rudest shock, Scourged by the winds and cradled by the
rock.
Byron's own account of his adventures, published in 1768, is
remarkable for freshness of scenery like that of our first literary
traveller, Sir John Mandeville, and a force of description which recalls
Defoe. It interests us more especially from the use that has been made
of it in that marvellous mosaic of voyages, the shipwreck, in Don Juan,
the hardships of his hero being, according to the poet--
Comparative To those related in my grand-dad's narrative.
In June, 1764, Byron sailed with two ships, the "Dolphin" and the
"Tamar," on a voyage of discovery arranged by Lord Egmont, to seek a
southern continent, in the course of which he took possession of the
largest of the Falkland Islands, again passed through the Magellanic
Straits, and sailing home by the Pacific, circumnavigated the globe.
The planets so conspired that, though his affable manners and
considerate treatment made him always popular with his men, sailors
became afraid to serve under "foul-weather Jack." In 1748 he married
the daughter of a Cornish squire, John Trevanion. They had two sons
and three daughters. One of the latter married her cousin (the fifth
lord's eldest son), who died in 1776, leaving as his sole heir the youth
who fell in the Mediterranean in 1794.
The eldest son of the veteran, John Byron, father of the poet, was born
in 1751, educated at Westminster, and, having received a commission,
became a captain in the guards; but his