Page:Royal Naval Biography Marshall v3p2.djvu/71

 . was le Renard schooner, afterwards commissioned as a British cruiser.

In the summer of 1805, the Camelion was ordered to England, being quite worn out, and Lieutenant Bennett gladly availed himself of an opportunity of exchanging into the Seahorse 38, then commanded by Captain the Hon. Courtenay Boyle, but soon afterwards by the late Captain Robert Corbett, – of whom it has been said, that “his guns were a secondary consideration, but in all the evolutions of a ship, – unmooring, weighing, making and shortening sail, furling, reefing, tacking, &c. &c. none could approach the one he commanded without a certainty of being second.” Many tried to excel the Seahorse in these points, but they were all beaten. “In default of meeting with enemies to engage,” says one of her officers, “Captain Corbett amused us with a tolerable proportion of drilling, by dint of which, and with a little other assistance, he brought the ship into that state of (shall I say) discipline, that I never witnessed any thing like it.”

In April, 1800, Captain Corbett was superseded, off Cadiz (on his return from an unauthorised trip to the West Indies), by the late Captain John Stewart, whose manner of treating his officers and men was such, that “he could command their every nerve, fibre, and faculty, to the very gates of death.”

In March, 1807, the Seahorse, now having been thoroughly refitted at Sheerness, was ordered again to the Mediterranean; but, while beating through the Straits of Dover, in a thick fog and strong gale of wind, she struck on the Varne shoal, owing to a mistake of the master, and knocked off her false keel and rudder. In endeavouring to save the latter. Captain Stewart and Lieutenant Bennett were both considerably bruised by the snapping of a hawser, with which they were trying to hang it. Having beat over the shoal, the ship was brought up for the night with three cables an-end; and next morning, the wind being then to the northward, she worked back to the Downs, with a gun-brig and pilot-boat