Memoir of Fleeming Jenkin | Page 8

he would say, 'what depth of water have ye? Well now,
sound; and ye'll just find so or so many fathoms,' as the case might be;
and the obnoxious passenger was generally right. On one occasion, as
the ship was going into Corfu, Sir Thomas came up the hatchway and
cast his eyes towards the gallows. 'Bangham' - Charles Jenkin heard
him say to his aide-de-camp, Lord Bangham - 'where the devil is that
other chap? I left four fellows hanging there; now I can only see three.
Mind there is another there to-morrow.' And sure enough there was
another Greek dangling the next day. 'Captain Hamilton, of the
CAMBRIAN, kept the Greeks in order afloat,' writes my author, 'and
King Tom ashore.'
From 1823 onward, the chief scene of Charles Jenkin's activities was in
the West Indies, where he was engaged off and on till 1844, now as a
subaltern, now in a vessel of his own, hunting out pirates, 'then very
notorious' in the Leeward Islands, cruising after slavers, or carrying
dollars and provisions for the Government. While yet a midshipman, he
accompanied Mr. Cockburn to Caraccas and had a sight of Bolivar. In
the brigantine GRIFFON, which he commanded in his last years in the
West Indies, he carried aid to Guadeloupe after the earthquake, and
twice earned the thanks of Government: once for an expedition to
Nicaragua to extort, under threat of a blockade, proper apologies and a
sum of money due to certain British merchants; and once during an
insurrection in San Domingo, for the rescue of certain others from a
perilous imprisonment and the recovery of a 'chest of money' of which
they had been robbed. Once, on the other hand, he earned his share of
public censure. This was in 1837, when he commanded the ROMNEY
lying in the inner harbour of Havannah. The ROMNEY was in no
proper sense a man-of-war; she was a slave-hulk, the bonded

warehouse of the Mixed Slave Commission; where negroes, captured
out of slavers under Spanish colours, were detained provisionally, till
the Commission should decide upon their case and either set them free
or bind them to apprenticeship. To this ship, already an eye-sore to the
authorities, a Cuban slave made his escape. The position was invidious;
on one side were the tradition of the British flag and the state of public
sentiment at home; on the other, the certainty that if the slave were kept,
the ROMNEY would be ordered at once out of the harbour, and the
object of the Mixed Commission compromised. Without consultation
with any other officer, Captain Jenkin (then lieutenant) returned the
man to shore and took the Captain-General's receipt. Lord Palmerston
approved his course; but the zealots of the anti-slave trade movement
(never to be named without respect) were much dissatisfied; and thirty-
nine years later, the matter was again canvassed in Parliament, and
Lord Palmerston and Captain Jenkin defended by Admiral Erskine in a
letter to the TIMES (March 13, 1876).
In 1845, while still lieutenant, Charles Jenkin acted as Admiral Pigot's
flag captain in the Cove of Cork, where there were some thirty
pennants; and about the same time, closed his career by an act of
personal bravery. He had proceeded with his boats to the help of a
merchant vessel, whose cargo of combustibles had taken fire and was
smouldering under hatches; his sailors were in the hold, where the
fumes were already heavy, and Jenkin was on deck directing operations,
when he found his orders were no longer answered from below: he
jumped down without hesitation and slung up several insensible men
with his own hand. For this act, he received a letter from the Lords of
the Admiralty expressing a sense of his gallantry; and pretty soon after
was promoted Commander, superseded, and could never again obtain
employment.
In 1828 or 1829, Charles Jenkin was in the same watch with another
midshipman, Robert Colin Campbell Jackson, who introduced him to
his family in Jamaica. The father, the Honourable Robert Jackson,
Custos Rotulorum of Kingston, came of a Yorkshire family, said to be
originally Scotch; and on the mother's side, counted kinship with some
of the Forbeses. The mother was Susan Campbell, one of the
Campbells of Auchenbreck. Her father Colin, a merchant in Greenock,
is said to have been the heir to both the estate and the baronetcy; he

claimed neither, which casts a doubt upon the fact, but he had pride
enough himself, and taught enough pride to his family, for any station
or descent in Christendom. He had four daughters. One married an
Edinburgh writer, as I have it on a first account - a minister, according
to another - a man at least of reasonable station, but not good enough
for the Campbells of Auchenbreck;