Memoir of Fleeming Jenkin | Page 7

family'; by which I gather with
some surprise that, even in these days of open house at Northiam and
golden hope of my aunt's fortune, the family was supposed to stand in
need of restoration. But the past is apt to look brighter than nature,
above all to those enamoured of their genealogy; and the ravages of
Stephen and Thomas must have always given matter of alarm.
What with the flattery of bishops and admirals, the fine company in
which he found himself at Portsmouth, his visits home, with their
gaiety and greatness of life, his visits to Mrs. Buckner (soon a widow)
at Windsor, where he had a pony kept for him, and visited at Lord
Melville's and Lord Harcourt's and the Leveson-Gowers, he began to
have 'bumptious notions,' and his head was 'somewhat turned with fine
people'; as to some extent it remained throughout his innocent and
honourable life.
In this frame of mind the boy was appointed to the CONQUEROR,
Captain Davie, humorously known as Gentle Johnnie. The captain had
earned this name by his style of discipline, which would have figured
well in the pages of Marryat: 'Put the prisoner's head in a bag and give
him another dozen!' survives as a specimen of his commands; and the
men were often punished twice or thrice in a week. On board the ship
of this disciplinarian, Charles and his father were carried in a billy-boat
from Sheerness in December, 1816: Charles with an outfit suitable to

his pretensions, a twenty-guinea sextant and 120 dollars in silver,
which were ordered into the care of the gunner. 'The old clerks and
mates,' he writes, 'used to laugh and jeer me for joining the ship in a
billy- boat, and when they found I was from Kent, vowed I was an old
Kentish smuggler. This to my pride, you will believe, was not a little
offensive.'
THE CONQUEROR carried the flag of Vice-Admiral Plampin,
commanding at the Cape and St. Helena; and at that all-important islet,
in July, 1817, she relieved the flagship of Sir Pulteney Malcolm. Thus
it befel that Charles Jenkin, coming too late for the epic of the French
wars, played a small part in the dreary and disgraceful afterpiece of St.
Helena. Life on the guard-ship was onerous and irksome. The anchor
was never lifted, sail never made, the great guns were silent; none was
allowed on shore except on duty; all day the movements of the imperial
captive were signalled to and fro; all night the boats rowed guard
around the accessible portions of the coast. This prolonged stagnation
and petty watchfulness in what Napoleon himself called that
'unchristian' climate, told cruelly on the health of the ship's company. In
eighteen months, according to O'Meara, the CONQUEROR had lost
one hundred and ten men and invalided home one hundred and seven,
being more than a third of her complement. It does not seem that our
young midshipman so much as once set eyes on Bonaparte; and yet in
other ways Jenkin was more fortunate than some of his comrades. He
drew in water-colour; not so badly as his father, yet ill enough; and this
art was so rare aboard the CONQUEROR that even his humble
proficiency marked him out and procured him some alleviations.
Admiral Plampin had succeeded Napoleon at the Briars; and here he
had young Jenkin staying with him to make sketches of the historic
house. One of these is before me as I write, and gives a strange notion
of the arts in our old English Navy. Yet it was again as an artist that the
lad was taken for a run to Rio, and apparently for a second outing in a
ten-gun brig. These, and a cruise of six weeks to windward of the island
undertaken by the CONQUEROR herself in quest of health, were the
only breaks in three years of murderous inaction; and at the end of that
period Jenkin was invalided home, having 'lost his health entirely.'
As he left the deck of the guard-ship the historic part of his career came
to an end. For forty-two years he continued to serve his country

obscurely on the seas, sometimes thanked for inconspicuous and
honourable services, but denied any opportunity of serious distinction.
He was first two years in the LARNE, Captain Tait, hunting pirates and
keeping a watch on the Turkish and Greek squadrons in the
Archipelago. Captain Tait was a favourite with Sir Thomas Maitland,
High Commissioner of the Ionian Islands - King Tom as he was called
- who frequently took passage in the LARNE. King Tom knew every
inch of the Mediterranean, and was a terror to the officers of the watch.
He would come on deck at night; and with his broad Scotch accent,
'Well, sir,'