Page:Notes and Queries - Series 10 - Volume 4.djvu/392

 322 NOTES AND QUERIES. [io» s. iv. OCT. 21.1903. Great commanders, if they do not take to scribbling books, as our generals do now, speak usually, as Cseaar does in his ' Com- mentaries,' in a trenchant way, that makes you think of cutting the words out with a sword from a block of them in the dictionary. Now marine phraseology would not come weakened from the mouth of a Nelson. Csesar, Scipio, Saxe, Czar Peter, Wellington, are all laconic, as if they hailed more from Sparta than from Athens. It shines through even the wit of Napier's "Peccavi," "I have Scinde." Napoleon's " Behold the sun of Austerlitz !" has it, only glistening, as is usual in his case, with the tinselled touches added of the tawdry stage, where they call a man an actor who can, at highest, only mimic men who act. I hope this may prevent the bastard blazon of this high-sea moralizing. C. A. WARD. Walthamstow. [A letter from Mr. G. Carslake Thompson, another grandson of Capt. Browne, with reference to Nelson's signal, was reprinted at 9th S. vi. 45 from The Times of 26 June, 1900. See also the articles on the sub- ject at 8th 8. xi. 405; xii.9, especially the extracts from contemporary and other authorities at the latter reference. With respect to Nelson's signal and also the pro- nunciation of the name of the battle see CANON HEWITT'S article, post, p. 329, and the references appended. Is not the accuracy of the utterance attributed to Napier disputed ?] NELSON RECOLLECTIONS. YOUR readers may be interested in the following, which, under the heading 'The Nelson Centenary,' appeared in The Times of 15 September :— "Mr. R. Robbing writes from Crouch Hill, N., under date September 14:—' I was much interested in the letter which appeared in your issue of to-day relating to Lord Nelson embarking at Portsmouth exactly 100 years ago for his last and most glorious voyage. But 1 have a personal recollection in reference to the great admiral which goes back further even than Trafalgar; and as I was born in 1817, my recollections are long indeed. I knew well for many years a townsman of mine at Launceston, in Cornwall, who fought as a Bailor in the battle of the Nile in 1798 on board his Majesty's ship Swift- sure, which, I have been told, was Nelson's flag- ship. John Burt was the name of this worthy, and he was born in or about 1767, the year of my own father's birth, and he had the bad fortune, not long after the Nile, to be taken a prisoner of war by the French. When he was released he returned to Launceston, and set up in business for himself as a shoemaker, to which trade he had been apprenticed before he went to sea ; and he was appointed by the Corporation to be one of the town sergeants or sergeants-at-mace. He was always popularly known by the nickname of " Swiftsure," in memory of the ship in which he had fought, and he died in 1843 or 1844. May I add another remembrance which also has to do with the long French war? A number of French prisoners, both officers and privates, were sent to Launceston during its progress; but though they all went home after the peace, one of them returned to the place, where he had made many friends, and, having become attached to the Methodist body, he was appointed caretaker of the Launceston Wesleyan Chapel. When I was a boy I knew very well this ex-prisoner of war, who was greatly respected in the town, and who died there just before the late Queen Victoria came to the Throne.'" An extract from The Wesleyan Methodist Magasine for October, 1844, referring to these prisoners of war in general and the one I myself knew in particular, was given at 8th S. x. 138. I might add, as specially touching my recollections of a sailor who fought under Nelson at the Nile, that on the evening after my letter had been published in The Time» the London correspondent of The Manchester Guardian telegraphed to his journal the fol- lowing :— "A remarkable link with the past comes to my knowledge to-night. There lives in Stepney an aged Jewess, a Mrs. Hart, whose father fought on board Nelson's Vanguard in the battle of the Nile. His name was Richard Barnett, and his daughter, who is now ninety-five, says that he was forced into the navy by a pressgang, and afterwards bought out by his father. Mrs. Hart possesses an interesting log-book, which seems to have been kept by her father during the voyage of the Vanguard, extend- ing from December 24, 1797, to January 31, 1800. It consists of eleven faded and worm-eaten sheets of quarto size. There is a fairly detailed account of the battle of the Nile, which is illustrated by a sort of plan of the fight, and accompanied by a list of the casualties. Richard Barnett, who waa pro- bably one of the first Jewish sailors in the English navy, was born in 1779. His private log-book moat have been a contravention of the regulations, but it certainly forms a most interesting document. He> died on June 20, 1819. He was an uncle of Samuel Phillips, critic and essayist, whose bust is in the Crystal Palace." The Vanguard, I now find, was the great admiral's flagship in that famous battle, though Nelson just previously had thought of shifting his flag to some other vessel because of her wretched condition ; but the Swiftsure, on which my old friend was, did good service in the fight. R. BOBBINS. NELSON'S ROYAL DESCENT. AT a time when the nation is celebrating the centenary of the great admiral it may not be uninteresting to the readers of' N. <fe Q/" to be reminded that Lord Nelson had royal blood in his veins, being seventeenth in direct- descent from King Ed ward I., as the follow- ing table shows:—