VALERIE 1849

This edition will include all the novels and tales, only omitting the three items marked in the above list with an Asterisk. The text will be, for the most part, that of the first editions, except for the correction of a few obvious errors and some modernisation of spelling. Rattlin the Reefer, so frequently attributed to Marryat, will not be reprinted here. It was written by Edward Howard, subeditor, under Marryat, of the

The Metropolitan Magazine, and author of Outward Bound, etc. On the title-page it is described simply as edited by Marryat and, according to his daughter, the Captain did no more than stand literary sponsor to the production. In 1850, Saunders and Otley published:— The Floral Telegraph, or, Affections Signals by the late Captain Marryat, R.N., but Mrs Lean knows nothing of the book, and it is probably not Marryat's work.

The Life and Letters of Captain Marryat: by Florence Marryat (Mrs Lean), in 2 vols.: Richard Bentley 1872, are the only biographical record of the novelist extant. In some matters they are very detailed and personal, in others reticent. The story has been spiritedly retold, with reflections and criticisms, by Mr David Hannay in the"Great Writers"Series, 1889.

The frontispiece is from a print, published by Henry Colburn in 1836, after the portrait by Simpson, the favourite pupil of Sir Thomas Lawrence, which was"considered more like him than any other."Count D'Orsay took a portrait of Marryat, in coloured crayons, about 1840, but it was not a success. A portrait, in water colours, by Behnes, was engraved as a frontispiece to The Pirate and The Three Cutters. His bust was taken by Carew.

R.B.J.

Frederick Marryat

Without yielding implicit credence to the handsome pedigree of the Marryats supplied by Mrs Lean, the novelist's daughter, we may give a glance in passing to the first-fruits of this family tree. They— naturally—came over with the Conqueror, and emerged from obscurity under Stephen as the proud"possessors of much lands at the village of Meryat, Ashton Meryat, and elsewhere in Somersetshire … One Nicotas de Maryet is deputed to collect the ransom of Richard Coeur de Leon through the county of Somerset … In the reign of Edward I., Sir John de Maryet is called to attend the Great Parliament; in that of Edward II., his son is excommunicated for embowelling his deceased wife;'a fancy,'says the county historian,'peculiar to the knightly family of Meryat.'"Mrs Lean quotes records of other Meryat"hearts"to which an honourable burial has been accorded. The house of Meryat finally lost its property on the fall of Lady Jane Grey, to whom it had descended through the female line.

Captain Marryat belonged to the Suffolk branch of the family, of whom"one John de Maryat had the honour of dancing in a masque before the Virgin Queen at Trinity College, Cambridge … was sent to aid the Huguenots in their wars in France … escaped the massacre of St Bartholemew and, in 1610, returned to England."Here he married"Mary, the daughter and heiress of Daniel Luke, of the Covent Garden (a rank Puritan family in Hudibras), and again settled in his paternal county of Suffolk."Less partial biographers neglect to trace the Marryats beyond this Huguenot officer, who is described by them as a refugee.

Whatever may be the truth of these matters, it is certain that during the 17th and 18th centuries the Maryats were a respectable, middle-class Puritan family—ministers, doctors, and business men. In the days of the merry monarch a John Marryat became distinguished as a"painful preacher,"and was twice expelled from his livings for non-conformity. Captain Marryat's grandfather was a good doctor, and his father, Joseph Marryat of Wimbledon House, was an M.P., chairman for the committee of Lloyd's, and colonial agent for the island of Grenada—a substantial man, who refused a baronetcy, and was honoured by an elegy from Campbell. He married Charlotte Geyer, or Von Geyer, a Hessian of good descent.

Frederick, born July 10, 1792, was one of fifteen sons and daughters,"of whom ten attained maturity, and several have entered the lists of literature."His eldest brother, Joseph, was a famous collector of china, and author of Pottery and Porcelain; the youngest, Horace, wrote One Year in Sweden, Jutland and the Danish Isles; and his sister, Mrs Bury Palliser, was the author of Nature and Art (not to be confounded with Mrs Inchbald's novel of that name), The His tory of Lace, and His toric Devices, Badges and War Cries. His father and grandfather published political and medical works, respectively, while the generation below was equally prolific. Marryat's youngest son, Frank, described his travels in Borneo and the Eastern Archipelago and

Mountains and Molehills, or Recollections of a Burnt Journal; and his daughter Florence, Mrs Lean, the author of his Life and Letters, has written a great many popular novels.

We can record little of Marryat's boyhood beyond a general impression of his discontent with school-masters and parents. Mr Hannay is probably right in regarding his hard pictures of home and school life as reflections of his own experience.

It is said that on one occasion he was found to be engaged in the pursuit of knowledge while standing on his head; and that he accounted for the circumstance with a humorous philosophy almost worthy of Jack Easy—"We ll! I've been trying for three hours to learn it on my feet, but I couldn't, so I thought I would try whether it would be easier to learn it on my head."Another anecdote, of a contest with his school-fellow Babbage, is interesting and characteristic. It appears that the inventor of the calculating machine, unlike Marryat, was a very diligent lad; and that he accordingly arranged, with some kindred spirits, to begin work at three in the morning. The restless Marryat wished to join the party, but his motives were suspected and the conspirators adopted the simple expedient of not waking him. Marryat rolled his bed across the door, and Babbage pushed it away. Marryat tied a string from his wrist to the door handle, and Babbage unfastened it. A thicker string was cut, a chain was unlinked by pliers, but at last the future captain forged a chain that was too stout for the future mathematician. Babbage, however, secured his revenge; as soon as his comrade was safely asleep he slipped a piece of pack thread through the chain and, carrying the other end to his own bed, was enabled by a few rapid jerks to waken Marryat whenever he chose. Apparently satisfied with his victory in the gentle art of tormenting, Babbage yielded voluntarily upon the original point of dispute. Marryat and others joined the reading party, transformed it to a scene of carnival, and were discovered by the authorities.

Meanwhile Marryat was constantly running away—to sea; according to his own account because he was obliged to wear his elder brother's old clothes. On one occasion his father injudiciously sent him back in a carriage with some money in his pocket. The wise youth slipped out, and finding his way home by some quiet approach, carried off his younger brothers to the theatre. He finally ran away from a private tutor, and Mr Marryat recognised the wisdom of compliance. Being then fourteen, that is of age to hold a commission, Frederick was allowed to enter the navy, and on the 23rd of September 1806, he started on his first voyage on board H.M.S. Impérieuse, Captain Lord Cochrane, for the Mediterranean.

He could scarcely have entered upon his career under better auspices. In a line-of-battle ship he would have had no chance of service at this stage of the war, when the most daring of the French could not be decoyed out of port; but the frigates had always more exciting work on hand than mere patrolling. The re were cruisers to be captured, privateers to be cut off, convoys to be taken, and work to be done on the coast among the forts. And Lord Cochrane, Earl of Dundonald, was not the man to neglect his opportunities. His daring gallantry and cool judgment are accredited to most of Marryat's captains, particularly in

Frank Mildmay, where the cruise of the Impérieuse along the Spanish coast is most graphically and literally described. Cochrane's

Autobiography betrays the strong, stern individuality of the man, invaluable in action, somewhat disturbing in civil life. As a reformer in season and out of season, at the Admiralty or in the House of Commons, his zeal became a bye-word, but Marryat knew him only on board his frigate, as an inspiring leader of men. He never passed an opportunity of serving his country and winning renown, but his daring was not reckless.

"I must here remark,"says Marryat in his private log,"that I never knew any one so careful of the lives of his ship's company as Lord Cochrane, or any one who calculated so closely the risks attending any expedition. Many of the most brilliant achievements were performed without loss of a single life, so well did he calculate the chances; and one half the merit which he deserves for what he did accomplish has never been awarded him, merely because, in the official despatches, there has not been a long list of killed and wounded to please the appetite of the English public."

Marryat has left us a graphic account of his first day at sea:—

"The Impérieuse sailed; the Admiral of the port was one who would

be obeyed, but would not listen always to reason or common sense. The signal for sailing was enforced by gun after gun; the anchor was hove up, and, with all her stores on deck, her guns not even mounted, in a state of confusion unparalleled from her being obliged to hoist in faster than it was possible she could stow away, she was driven out of harbour to encounter a heavy gale. A few hours more would have enabled her to proceed to sea with security, but they were denied; the consequences were appalling, they might have been fatal. In the general confusion some iron too near the binnacles had attracted the needle of the compasses; the ship was steered out of her course. At midnight, in a heavy gale at the close of November, so dark that you could not distinguish any object, however close, the Impérieuse

dashed upon the rocks between Ushant and the Main. The cry of terror which ran through the lower decks; the grating of the keel as she was forced in; the violence of the shocks which convulsed the frame of the vessel; the hurrying up of the ship's company without their clothes; and then the enormous wave which again bore her up, and carried her clean over the reef, will never be effaced from my memory."

This, after all, was not an inappropriate introduction to the stormy three years which followed it. The story is written in the novels, particularly Frank Mildmay[1] where every item of his varied and exciting experience is reproduced with dramatic effect. It would be impossible to rival Marryat's narrative of episodes, and we shall gain no sense of reality by adjusting the materials of fiction to an exact accordance with fact. He says that these books, except Frank Mildmay,

are"wholly fictitious in characters, in plot, and in events,"but they are none the less truthful pictures of his life at sea. Cochrane's

Autobiography contains a history of the Impérieuse; it is from

Peter Simple and his companions that we must learn what Marryat thought and suffered while on board.

Under Cochrane he cruised along the coast of France from Ushant to the mouth of the Gironde, saw some active service in the Mediterranean, and, after a return to the ocean, was finally engaged in the Basque Roads. A page of his private log contains a lively resumé of the whole experience:—

"The cruises of the Impérieuse were periods of continual excitement, from the hour in which she hove up her anchor till she dropped it again in port; the day that passed without a shot being fired in anger, was to us a blank day: the boats were hardly secured on the booms than they were cast loose and out again; the yard and stay tackles were forever hoisting up and lowering down. The expedition with which parties were formed for service; the rapidity of the frigate's movements night and day; the hasty sleep snatched at all hours; the waking up at the report of the guns, which seemed the only keynote to the hearts of those on board, the beautiful precision of our fire, obtained by constant practice; the coolness and courage of our captain, inoculating the whole of the ship's company; the suddenness of our attacks, the gathering after the combat, the killed lamented, the wounded almost envied; the powder so burnt into our face that years could not remove it; the proved character of every man and officer on board, the implicit trust and adoration we felt for our commander; the ludicrous situations which would occur in the extremest danger and create mirth when death was staring you in the face, the hair-breadth escapes, and the indifference to life shown by all—when memory sweeps along these years of excitement even now, my pulse beats more quickly with the reminiscence."

After some comparatively colourless service in other frigates, during which he gained the personal familiarity with We st Indian life of which his novels show many traces, he completed his time as a midshipman, and in 1812, returned home to pass. As a lieutenant his cruises were uneventful and, after being several times invalided, he was promoted Commander in 1815, just as the Great War was closing. He was now only twenty-three, and had certainly received an Admirable training for the work with which he was soon to enchant the public. Though never present at a great battle, and many good officers were in the same position, he had seen much smart service and knew from others what lay beyond his own experience. He evidently took copious notes of all he saw and heard. He had sailed in the North Sea, in the Channel, in the Mediterranean, and along the Eastern coast of America from Nova Scotia to Surinam. He had been rapidly promoted.

It is tolerably obvious that, both as midshipman and lieutenant, he evinced the cool daring and manly independence that characterises his heroes, with a dash perhaps of Jack Easy's philosophy. It was a rough life and he was not naturally amenable to discipline, but probably his superiors made a favourite of the dashing handsome lad. The habit, which helps to redeem Frank Mildmay and even graces Peter Simple, of saving others from drowning, was always his own. His daughter records, with pardonable pride, that he was presented while in the navy with twenty-seven certificates, recommendations, and votes of thanks for having saved the lives of others at the risk of his own, besides receiving a gold medal from the Humane Society.

During the peace of 1815 he"occupied himself in acquiring a perfect knowledge of such branches of science as might prove useful should the Lords of the Admiralty think fit to employ him in a voyage of discovery or survey."A vaguely projected expedition to Africa was, however, relinquished on account of his marriage with"Catherine, second daughter of Sir Stephen Shairp, Knt., of Houston, Co. Linlithgow (for many years Her Britannic Majesty's Consul-General, and twice chargé d'affaires at the court of Russia);"which took place in January 1819. In this same year he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society, according to tradition on account of his skill in drawing caricatures.

He was at sea again soon after his marriage as commander of the Beaver

sloop, in which commission he was sent to mount guard over Napoleon at St Helena until his death. He took a sketch of the dead emperor in full profile, which was engraved in England and France, and considered a striking likeness. He was meanwhile no doubt perfecting the code of signals for the use of merchant vessels of all nations, including the cipher for secret correspondence, which was immediately adopted, and secured to its inventor the Cross of the Legion of Honour from Louis Philippe. It was not actually published in book form till 1837, from which date its sale produced an Appreciable income.