Page:Memoirs of a Trait in the Character of George III.djvu/253

196 assisted him twenty-five years, but we will say twenty; and if we give him half as much as his Father, which, under so able an instructor, he could scarcely fail to earn, the calculation from these data results in £27,000. This excess of 3,000 above the 24 stated to have been received, we will deduct for bad debts, or any casualty Mr. Croker may object (though we can think of none like those which were so near sending William Harrison, with the Timekeeper, to the bottom in the Merlin.) Now we assert that whoever knew John Harrison, would immediately have said, that no consideration on earth could have tempted him to arrive at the same point of recompense through those hateful scenes in which he had to contend with such objectionable characters as any man becomes who is not ashamed to sit in judgment on his own cause—an oppression from which this worthy citizen, as well as scientific and enterprising genius, was finally relieved only by the interference of George 3rd.

Had Mr. Croker lighted on the Journal often referred to, and seen a passage in it, we may reckon sure, that his notion of the profitable speculation of the Candidate and his Son, would have been altered much for the worse. Nay—the reward doubled, tripled, and quadrupled, would have left him no desire to share a modicum of such good fortune.

When Mr. Harrison went on board the Merlin, Captain Bourke, who commanded her, advised him to place the Timekeeper on the counter, or after-part of the ship, in the cabin; his reason for this, was, that if they should fall in with a hard gale of wind, that, he said, would be the likeliest place in the ship to be dry. After they had been at sea about three weeks, they fell in with a hard gale of wind; and the ship sprung a leak. The wind continued to blow exceedingly hard, with little interruption, for upwards of three weeks; during which time it was with the greatest difficulty that Mr. Harrison was able at some times to keep the salt water out of the box which contained the Timekeeper; for it blew so hard that they were forced to lay to for the most part; and the ship at those times would receive such violent shocks by the breaking of the waves against her quarter, that the Timekeeper received almost as violent blows as if it had been thrown in its box from one side of the cabin to the other: and by these violent shocks of the waves the water would spurn [spume] through every joint in the ship. And in order to keep it out of the box in which the Timekeeper was, Mr. Harrison had no other method but to keep a blanket about it; and when it had imbibed so much water, that he could with his hand squeeze it out, he then took that blanket off, and placed the box in another. And he had at some times no other method to get these blankets dry again, but by covering himself and to refuse us the use of the last made one, to serve as a model for the different parts to be made by other workmen.—