The Admiral
A Romance of Nelson in the Year of the Nile
9781465622754
100 pages
Library of Alexandria
Overview
MY Lord Eastry belonged to the grand old race of East Kent squires, who brought up their sons to fear nothing and hate the French, aye, and brought up their daughters to be the wives and mothers of men who should sail the salt seas till too stiff with age or wounds to climb to their quarter-decks. For how could their sons help going to sea when they saw the boatmen of Deal from their open beach defying the guns of the French and the might of the fiercest storms that blew? My Lord Eastry began his bold life as younger son of a squire, who bore the old Kent name of Fleet. But of John Fleet, the eldest, there is only an empty memorial in Eastry Church, which records that “his body lies in the great South Seas in the hope of a joyful resurrection.” His ship, full of honour and glory and prize-money, was spoken two days east of Trinidad in the great storm of 1759; and mariners maintain that fighting Jack Fleet’s black frigate sails there still, whenever the cyclone is coming down, with canvas enough on her to overset a hundred-gun ship. And Dick had his call on the glorious 1st of June—had the van-ship and sailed into the French with the grand air of his family, as if he never could have his belly full of fighting—laid alongside half a dozen of them at one time and another, and had a chain-shot through his middle just as he sent the Vengeur to the bottom with her colours in the act of striking. Once he was hard pressed, though; and Harry, the Lord Eastry that, as he lay dying, drank Wellington’s health when the news was brought of Waterloo, saw it and, leaving the line flat in neglect of signals, bore up to him. Lord! what a family they were to fight! When the tall Ramillies ran in between the Brunswick and the Achille to receive her fire, it was like an explosion of devils from hell. The men, men of the Cinque Ports that all had a dead father or a dead brother to charge to the French, would have followed Jack, Dick, or Harry into Nebuchadnezzar’s fiery furnace. Well, Harry Fleet—the Lord Harry, as they called him in the Channel—came safe out of the great battle; and not so many months afterwards fell upon a great convoy guarded by ships that should have blown his squadron of frigates out of the water, drove their escort under the guns of Martinique, and carried the convoy, with the army on board them that should have taken our Indies, safe into Antigua, from which he brought home more prize-money than ever. He was just too late to close the eyes of his father, the tough old squire of Eastry who lived his fourscore-and-odd years like his fathers before him, the few of them that did not die with their shoes on and the flag overhead.
