Narratives of Shipwrecks of the Royal Navy | Page 6

Meldrum sprang overboard, and swam towards the ship, and was thus the means of saving his companion's life as well as his own.
In a volume like this, 'the dangers of the seas' come before the reader in such rapid succession, that he has scarcely time to think of the many other awful perils and sufferings, besides those of wind and storm, which put the mariner's fortitude to the test. The narratives in pages 2, 3, 9, 36, 69, 70, 113, 115, present to view the horrors of a ship on fire.
In pages 12, 169, 171, 196, 226, 242, we learn something of the terrible consequences of being exposed to fogs and mist, ice and snow. In page 27, we have a vivid picture of a combination of these terrors; and in pages 217, 268, the most appalling of all the dangers a sailor has to encounter is brought in view.
We will hope that the rigours and perils of the blockade system, which occasioned so fearful a loss of life at different periods of the late war, but especially in the disastrous year 1811, are at end for ever. From page 154 to 159, and from 168 to 186, the accounts of the loss of life in the Baltic and North Seas alone occur in fearful succession; and the magnanimity with which hundreds, nay, thousands of our bravest officers and men met death on that most perilous of all services, has rendered the names of British blockading ships memorable in the annals of hardship, hardihood, and suffering. Many invaluable lives perished from the inclemency of the weather; men were frozen to death at their posts. It is recorded of one devoted officer, Lieutenant Topping, that rushing on deck in anxiety for his ship, without giving himself time to put on his clothes, 'in fifteen minutes he fell upon the deck a corpse, stricken by the piercing blast and driving snow,' (p. 169.)
In page 174, we read of the bodies of the dead, victims to the cold and tempest, piled up by the survivors in rows one above another, on the deck of the St. George, to serve as a shelter against the violence of the waves and weather. 'In the fourth row lay the bodies of the Admiral and his friend Captain Guion;' and out of a crew of 750, seven only were saved.
The Defence, the consort of the St. George, was cast away in the same storm: out of her complement of 600, six was the small remnant of survivors. This ship might probably have escaped, but her gallant captain (Atkins) said, 'I will never desert my admiral in the hour of danger and distress,' (p. 175.)
An instance of obedience and discipline, worthy of particular mention, occurred before the St. George went down. A few men asked leave to attempt to reach the shore in the yawl. Permission was at first granted, but afterwards withdrawn, and the men returned to their posts without a murmur. 'As if Providence had rewarded their implicit obedience and reliance upon their officers,' says the narrative (p. 173), 'two of these men were of the few (seven) that were saved.'
The question now arises, to what are we to attribute the extraordinary display of cool determination manifested by British seamen, in such trials of nerve as are described in the following pages? The series of shipwrecks extends from 1793 to 1847, a period of fifty-four years; and tragic scenes are described, many of them far exceeding the imaginary terrors of fiction, and all of them equal in horror to anything that the Drama, Romance, or Poetry has attempted to delineate.
We rise from the perusal with scarcely any other impression upon our minds than that of wonder and admiration, at the extraordinary self-command exercised when death was staring every man in the face. Doubtless there are some instances of misbehaviour, and of lack of firmness: it could not be otherwise. 'When the stormy wind ariseth, and they are carried up to the heaven and down again to the deep, their soul melteth because of their trouble. They reel to and fro, and stagger like a drunken man, and are at their wit's end.' But such examples are so few in the British navy, that we have little on this score wherewith to reproach our seamen.
To what, then, are we to attribute the manly bearing of British seamen, when the planks of their ship tremble under their feet, and the waves are yawning to swallow them up!
First.--To the early training which almost all our youth receive, in one way or other. It begins at school. The first principles of generosity, as of obedience and order, are taught in our schools: whether in the national and parochial schools, or at Westminster, Eton, and Harrow, and other schools of a