Page:All the Year Round - Series 2 - Volume 1.djvu/353

Charles Dickens] rapacity, and ambition, sent him all wrong; he denounced Goring, and ordered the people to rise en masse and beat him out of Cornwall if he dare enter. He refused to act under Lord Hopton, the king's general-in-chief in the west, and was finally committed to prison by the prince for his oppression, tyranny, and disobedience. A gate, the sole surviving relic of the old Plymouth fortification, was pulled down in 1863.

An old resident in Plymouth, has drawn a graphic picture of the town, about the year 1809, and the crow, refreshing his memory by this means, looks back and sees again the Plymouth of the past. Old admirals then paced the streets, pig-tailed sailors revelled in the grog-shops, old heroes perambulated the Hoe. It was the time of hard fighting and press-gangs, of courts-martial, and frequent stringing up at the yard-arm. Old Haydon, the shrewd, clever father of the artist, was a printer and booksellcr then, in a large shop nearly opposite the end of Market-street, facing the awkward Guildhall. Haydon used to relate to favourite customers how, when a boy of seventeen, he had heard an old seaman describe the horrors of the storm of 1703. The man had seen Winstanley, when the sea was breaking over Drake's Island like a cascade, go off from the Barbican steps to the Eddystone lighthouse, of which he was the builder—but neither builder, nor the slightest fragment of the Pharos, were ever seen again after that night. Newsmongers and quidnuncs of all ranks frequented Haydon's shop. Old Captain Winne used to drop in, telescope under his arm, on his way to the Hoe or the Citadel. Winne had been with Lord Howe on the first of June, and used to relate exultingly how, when our line was complete, the admiral shouted, "Then up with the helm, in the name of God!" and dashed through the Frenchmen, felling seventy of the enemy in the Montagne alone with his sweeping broadsides. The Duke of Clarence, when stationed at Plymouth, fell in love with the fair sister of this Captain Winne. Then there was old Admiral Manly, who is said once, in a fog, to have kept up a long and steady fire at a cloud, that he mistook for a French ship. In Haydon's shop these veterans often met Admiral Vincent, a captain of 1747, who wrote a book on the non-existence of matter when he was between eighty and ninety years old; and brave one-armed Sir Michael Seymour, of the Amethyst. That huge man, General England, the lieutenant-governor, also sometimes dropped in. The Duke of York, by some supposed to be his brother, had christened him "Great Britain." Another habitué was Herbert, the banker, a thin old man, whom the townspeople had christened "Death," from the following story. Two tipsy sailors blundered one night into the banker's garden, in Frankfort-place; the shutters not being closed, one of them looked in at the window, and saw the pale, gaunt old man nodding alone over his parlour fire. He instantly called to his lingering messmate:

"Jack, Jack, heave a-head; if you never saw Death before, here he is."

And a fine Holbein picture of senile decay the story gives us.

The old resident remembers once, in this same wartime, yachting near the French coast, knowing old "Billy Blue" (Admiral Cornwallis) was between him and Brest, with twenty or thirty line-of-battle ships. Presently he saw hull down the mast of a large vessel; then soon after rose up two vessels, one towing the other. The Thetis, of forty-four guns, had been captured by Sir Michael Seymour's vessel, the Amethyst, of thirty-six. It had been a butchering fight of an hour and a half. The Thetis had lost one hundred and thirty-five killed and one hundred and two wounded, out of a crew of three hundred seamen and one hundred soldiers; the Amethyst about seventy killed or wounded out of two hundred and twenty or two hundred and thirty. The old resident went on board, and saw the shambles still uncleared; the bulwarks were jagged with shot; the shot thrown by us into the Frenchman's hull had in several places knocked two ports into one. Ghastly wounded men lay on blood-soaked hammocks and coils of rope, moaning and shrieking; the red deck was strewn with dying men, cut rigging, and severed limbs. The cockpit was choked with wounded sailors; on one plank thirteen miserable wretches were dying with lock jaw. "We can do nothing for them," the surgeons said, with looks of pity. The guns were splashed with blood, the steps of the gangways dripped with gore, the planks were sodden and black with powder.

On another occasion the old resident visited the Northumberland, that had just driven on shore two French frigates and a brig, and had had a brush with the Brest batteries. One French gun had killed six or eight of our men and wounded twenty-six. One shot beat out the brains of a seaman, killed a second man, and then passed nearly through the opposite side of the Northumberland. The ball was cut out, and hung in a netting in the ward-room, as a shot that had done its duty. Among the Northumberland's officers on this occasion was Stuart, who was afterwards master of the Susan when she was wrecked in Mount's Bay. A mounted methodist preacher rode into the waves and saved two men, but on the third attempt was swept away.

Another character of old Plymouth is remembered by the old resident. This was Captain Rotherham, one of the Smollet school of sailors, and the brave old tar who commanded the Royal Sovereign at Trafalgar, and would insist on wearing his enormous cocked-hat all through the battle, though it made him as conspicuous as the fatal diamond star did poor Nelson. Rotherham was a tall, wiry, mahogany-coloured veteran, who wore his cocked-hat square, and always carried a quid in his cheek.

There were Plymouth captains in these days, stiff-backed martinets, who considered Nelson