Sea Fever

by Sam Jefferson

  Jack was also particularly thrilled when one of the voyages resurrected one of the ghosts from his oyster pirate days. A trip up an obscure backwater led to an encounter with his old enemy ‘French Frank’, the jealous former keeper of Razzle Dazzle. The aged man was a shadow of his former self, but the meeting prompted more fond reminisces from Jack.

  This was 1911. Jack was still only in his late 30s and he had packed in enough adventure to last most a lifetime. This was fortunate, for the shadows were lengthening on his life. He had only three years left to live and he spent much of that time trying to destroy himself and his liver with booze and other drugs with which he had begun to self medicate. His health was failing by this time, which came as a supreme blow to a man who had always viewed himself as almost indestructible. His main problem was, without doubt, alcohol and the litres of rotgut he had consumed in his sailor days down on Oakland Wharf were starting to take their toll on his body. Jack had always suffered from severe bouts of depression and by 1912 he seemed to be plunging headlong into the abyss.

  Inevitably it was the call of the great wild open ocean and all the unknown vicissitudes within that pulled him back from the edge and he made one final foray back into the sea. Sensing that he desperately needed to dry out, London realised the best place to do this was aboard a ship. In 1912, he and Charmian undertook a voyage aboard one of the last Cape Horn windjammers, the Dirigo, on her voyage from New York to San Francisco, rounding the dreaded Cape Horn along the way. Despite the hardship of the voyage, the Londons enjoyed it greatly and Jack, who had spent a winter deep in the slough of a seemingly neverending hedonistic binge, seemed to rally, writing Mutiny of the Elsinore as a result. In addition to this, he laid out the bare bones of another book, John Barleycorn: an Alcoholic Memoir. This autobiographical piece was a stinging condemnation of the evils of alcohol and gathered together every single incident of his wild youth to illustrate the dangers of over-consumption. In addition to being deeply entertaining, the book proved to be a huge hit with the prohibitionist movement, who trumpeted Jack as a leader of their campaign to ban alcohol from sale.

  The sad reality was that even as he was being lauded for this confessional, London returned to the bottle as soon as he stepped off the decks of Dirigo. The trip around Cape Horn proved to be a final futile attempt to escape the inevitable. Two years later, aged 40, London was dead; a combination of heavy living, persistent illness and a cocktail of different medicines combined with booze had wrung the last drop of life out of him. On the night of his death, 22 November 1916, he turned in early, telling Charmian that he was ‘absolutely worn out’. He did not wake up from his drug-induced coma. It is telling that the book he put down on that last night was entitled Around Cape Horn: Maine to California in 1852 by Ship. His last written words formed a letter to his daughter inviting her to go sailing with him the following weekend. The sea and sailing remained two of his great passions right up to the final stroke of his pen. They always brought out the best in him. Just as the land never ceased to strangle him. So it was that the man to whom adventure was everything had died the most prosaic of deaths, many miles from the sea at his comfortable California ranch. Today, however, we still remember him as one of the few writers who can convey the raw thrill of venturing across oceans and raising mysterious and savage lands over the horizon with exhilarating sharpness. For that alone, Jack London’s sailing exploits and the literature that accompanied them deserve to be remembered and these words, written in his later years, form a fitting epitaph.

  And if a man is a born sailor, and has gone to the school of the sea, never in all his life can he get away from the sea again. The salt of it is in his bones as well as his nostrils, and the sea will call to him until he dies. Of late years, I have found easier ways of earning a living. I have quit the forecastle for keeps, but always I come back to the sea.

  Captain Marryat

  A forgotten hero of the Royal Navy

  Browse any bookshop in the UK for nautical literature and you will generally find that most of this section is devoted to fictional tales of Nelson’s navy and the period of the Napoleonic Wars. The shelves groan with swashbuckling stories of Horatio Hornblower, Lieutenant Ramage and a host of other disturbingly patriotic and worryingly chiselled young men hell-bent on saving the Royal Navy from the fiendish Frenchman. What is curious is that, among these books, you rarely find any publications by Captain Frederick Marryat, even though his stories formed the template for much contemporary naval fiction. Here was not only a writer more witty than any of his successors, but one who understood the navy during this period better than any of his imitators, having served with great distinction as an officer during the Napoleonic era.

  The fading of Captain Marryat and his books from the public consciousness is a shame, for his novels on the subject remain as fresh today as they did when they were first published in the 1830s. His ability to bring a naval scene to life is pretty much unparalleled, and his wit remains as relevant as ever. At his peak, he stood alongside Charles Dickens as the most popular novelist of his day, and his writing has entered into our culture: ‘It’s just six of one and half a dozen of the other’ is a phrase coined by Marryat. These days he is largely remembered as a writer of children’s literature: The Children of the New Forest and Masterman Ready, but he was much more than that. He was one of the grandfathers of nautical literature, and many of his successors (Melville, Conrad, and Masefield among others) touched on the profound influence of his books on their own writing.

  Before he was a writer, Marryat was a sailor and here his career followed a similar pattern. Despite his heroism afloat – he served bravely in many notable actions of the Napoleonic Wars and also personally saved at least three people from drowning during his naval career – he was never knighted and felt strangely overlooked even in his own lifetime. It is telling that one of his last acts before his death in 1848 was to burst several blood vessels during a particularly violent argument with the Admiralty over this lack of recognition.

  If his lack of renown is hard to explain, his life itself is also hard to unravel, for Marryat never wrote a complete autobiography, although he conceded that much of his fiction was reality, thus creating a tangled web of suppositions and intrigue. The bare facts of his upbringing can be sketched out thus: he was born in London in 1792 and came from a family of great wealth: his father, Joseph, was a hugely successful trader, with substantial holdings in the West Indies. His American mother, Charlotte had been a Boston society girl with a reputation for great beauty and had met Joseph while he was travelling abroad. It appears that Frederick’s early years were typified by the emotional detachment between parent and child that the English upper classes specialised in. Certainly he had a nanny, and any depiction of family life in his later novels generally portrays the father as a rather distant, cold sort of a chap and the mother as simpering and pathetic.

  At a young age he was sent away to a boarding school at Ponders End in Essex, which seemed to specialise in flogging. Young Marryat was clearly something of a free thinker and undoubtedly a bit of a wit, not to mention a troublemaker. Marryat’s daughter, Florence, had a crack at her father’s biography and described his schooldays:

  Learning with great facility, he forgot his tasks with equal readiness and, being of a genial temperament, he preferred play to lessons and was constantly flogged for inattentiveness and idleness.

  His master was heard, on more than one occasion, to declare that he and the late Charles Babbage (his classmate) could never come to any good, or be otherwise than dunces, seeing how little heed they paid to his instructions.

  The true irony of this statement can only be fully appreciated when you realise that Babbage later went on to become one of the greatest thinkers of his time and is often considered the father of the modern computer. Nevertheless, there is little doubt that Marryat was a hugely disruptive influence at school. One classmate recalled walking in on the youngster to find him balancing on his head, wh
ile placidly reading a book, ‘dignified but graceful’. When asked what he was up to, Marryat replied: ‘Well, I’ve been trying to learn it for three hours on my feet, but I couldn’t, so I thought it might go in easier if I was to learn it on my head.’ That kind of attitude was never going to go down particularly well at a Victorian school for gentlemen and it is no surprise that Marryat was almost perpetually running away, generally with the plan of going to sea. In actual fact, his father had little objection to this plan, provided it was done in good time. Frederick was his second son and did not stand to inherit the estate. As such he presented the family with a bit of a dilemma career-wise, particularly as he seemed to be such a loose cannon. Following Frederick’s fourth attempt at escape, his father relented and agreed to sign him up as a midshipman in the Royal Navy. Frederick was delighted and turned his back on school without a second thought. He later summed up the whole affair thus:

  What fool was it who said that the happiest times of our lives is passed at school? There may, indeed, be exceptions, but the remark cannot be generalised. Stormy as has been my life, the most miserable part of it (with very little exception) was passed at school; and my mind never received so much injury from any scenes of vice and excess in after-life, as it did from the shameful treatment and bad example I met with there.

  Marryat felt he had escaped, and was thrilled when his father informed him that he had been able to use his influence in order to attain him a position aboard the HMS Imperieuse, a 38-gun frigate. In this he was indeed fortunate, for she was commanded by Thomas Cochrane, who was newly appointed to the ship and a man who was to go down in the annals of naval history. Cochrane was a fiery Scotsman, very charismatic and exceedingly daring. His voyages in the HMS Speedy, Pallas and Arab had already made his name as a maverick and a man of uncommon dash and dare, and he had left a swathe of devastation in his wake. For Cochrane the thrill of naval action was irresistible and service aboard a ship commanded by him was always going to be an incident-packed affair. In addition to being an excellent captain, Cochrane was the archetypal renegade and his outspoken views were a permanent thorn in the side of the Admiralty. He had already sparked an international incident in 1803 when he had attacked an American merchant ship despite the countries not being at war. This was the forum within which young Marryat was to complete his schooling and, if it was a brutal and dangerous one, it was also rewarding, as Marryat was about to discover.

  Before we get to the action, however, it is important to take a look at the state of the Royal Navy itself. Marryat joined in 1806, a watershed year for the service. Three years into the Napoleonic Wars with France, the navy was taking stock following the previous year’s glorious victory at Trafalgar in which Nelson, the service’s great talisman, had perished. In the process, he had shattered the French Navy and her allies and for the remainder of the war it was largely accepted that Britain enjoyed naval superiority over the French and this was a position that was rarely challenged. Much of the fleet therefore spent their time blockading French ports, keeping the enemy fleet at bay in Toulon and generally waiting for something to happen, which it rarely did. What this did mean was that the coast of France and the Mediterranean as a whole was basically a giant playground for the British Navy, and the main aim of vessels such as the Imperieuse was in ‘cutting out’ or capturing any traders or privateers allied to the French. Not only was this exciting work, it was also very profitable to both captain and crew, who could expect to keep a share of the spoils of any captured vessels.

  Despite the clear superiority of British naval power, the service was certainly not without serious faults: In losing Nelson, the navy had lost its most dynamic commander, who was replaced by the more sedate Admiral Collingwood. The service was bloated with some 140,000 men in its employ at the peak of the Napoleonic Wars and many men had been forced, or press-ganged, into the service to make up the numbers. The navy could also be infuriatingly inflexible, while dominance of the waves brought complacency, incompetence and more than a hint of corruption. It was for these reasons that Cochrane opted to stand as MP for Honiton in 1806, the very year Marryat joined his ship. He was infuriated by certain aspects of the service and sought to place some of the bungling practices of the Admiralty under the spotlight. He was successfully elected and, in common with many MPs today, saw nothing unusual in pursuing his full-time job alongside the minor task of helping to run the country. The Admiralty were furious with him.

  It was against this backdrop of mutual contempt that Frederick Marryat sallied forth to Plymouth in order to board the Imperieuse. He was only 14 years old and as proud as any youngster could be. He arrived in Plymouth and spent his first night in an inn trying on his service uniform as he later recalled:

  One of the red-letter days of my life was that on which I first mounted the uniform of a midshipman. My pride and ecstasy were beyond description. I had discarded the school and school-boy dress, and, with them, my almost stagnant existence. Like the chrysalis changed into a butterfly, I fluttered about, as if to try my powers; and felt myself a gay and beautiful creature, free to range over the wide domains of nature, clear of the trammels of parents or schoolmasters; and my heart bounded within me at the thoughts of being left to enjoy, at my own discretion, the very acmé of all the pleasure that human existence can afford.

  But to return to my uniform. I had arrayed myself in it; my dirk was belted round my waist; a cocked-hat, of an enormous size, stuck on my head; and, being perfectly satisfied with my own appearance at the last survey which I had made in the glass, I first rang for the chambermaid, under pretence of telling her to make my room tidy, but, in reality, that she might admire and compliment me, which she very wisely did; and I was fool enough to give her half a crown and a kiss, for I felt myself quite a man.

  Thus attired, the young midshipman strutted out to find his ship and blundered straight into the Port Admiral, a Mr Young, who was returning with a group of officers from a court-martial. Here, the young officer was severely rebuked after he failed to touch his hat to Young and it was only after it was clear that the officers were rebuking the greenest officer in the service that he escaped being confined to the Imperieuse until she had left port. Smarting from this dressing down, Marryat sought out his captain, although this short stroll was not without further incident as he later recalled:

  During the remainder of my walk, I touched my hat to every one I met. I conferred the honour of salute on midshipmen, master’s mates, sergeants of marines, and two corporals. Nor was I aware of my over complaisance, until a young woman, dressed like a lady, who knew more of the navy than I did, asked me if I had come down to stand for the borough? Without knowing what she meant, I replied, ‘No.’ ‘I thought you might,’ said she, ‘seeing you are so damned civil to everybody.’ Had it not been for this friendly hint, I really believe I should have touched my hat to a drummer.

  Further chastened, he met with Cochrane and shortly afterward was rowed out to HMS Imperieuse, which was lying at anchor in Mutton Cove, down on the banks of the River Tamar. If the morning had been a trying one for the youngster, it was about to get worse, for stepping aboard his new vessel, his home for the next few years, he was faced with the grim reality of life aboard a man-of-war. The ship was fitting out and was in a dreadful mess; workmen were hammering oakum into the deck seams and the ship was strewn with wood shavings and general detritus. A recent heavy shower completed the depressing scene and for the first time it occurred to Marryat that perhaps school wasn’t such a bad place after all. Nevertheless, he steeled himself and headed below to his new quarters in the midshipman’s mess and received another dispiriting blow, which he described as follows:

  We descended a ladder, which brought us to the ’tween decks, and into the steerage, in the forepart of which, on the larboard side, abreast of the mainmast, was my future residence – a small hole which they called a berth; it was ten feet long by six, and about five feet four inches high; a small aperture, about nine inches square
, admitted a very scanty portion of that which we most needed, namely, fresh air and daylight. A deal table occupied a very considerable extent of this small apartment, and on it stood a brass candlestick, with a dip candle, and a wick like a full-blown carnation. The black servant was preparing for dinner, and I was shown the seat I was to occupy. ‘Good Heaven!’ thought I, as I squeezed myself between the ship’s side and the mess-table; ‘and is this to be my future residence? Better go back to school; there, at least, there is fresh air and clean linen’.

  The work of fitting out the ship continued for a further three weeks. Eventually, however, Cochrane was piped aboard and the ship prepared to head out to sea. The beginning of the voyage did not augur well for anyone aboard the Imperieuse, as Cochrane had returned from a stint in the House of Commons in an utterly foul mood and not without good reason. The Admiralty were thoroughly fed up with him, and his well-directed broadsides at them while he sat in the Commons made them all the more determined to be rid of this troublemaker. Cochrane was therefore ordered to the Imperieuse and told he must depart despite the fact that the vessel was some days away from readiness. In vain her captain argued with Admiral Young that he needed more time, but to no avail and Cochrane was eventually compelled to leave in a terrible state of disorganisation: stores were not stowed, rigging was unfinished and many of her guns were not shipped on to their carriages, and those that were had not been lashed to their ringbolts. Early on the morning of departure, a signal gun was fired from the shore, denoting that the Imperieuse must sail. Cochrane chose to ignore this and all through the day the signal gun boomed with increasing exasperation, yet it would not be until early evening that Admiral Young had the satisfaction of finally seeing the frigate slip out of the bay. ‘Damn his eyes! There he goes at last! I was afraid the fellow should have grounded on his own beef bones before we got him out!’ the Admiral was reported to exclaim with some satisfaction. The Imperieuse did not go far, and brought up in a bay just outside Plymouth where Cochrane oversaw the loading of powder and ammunition and made extra efforts to ensure all the cannon were lashed down. The weather was already looking menacing and a badly-secured cannon rattling around below decks during a gale could cause untold damage. Besides, what with Marryat and Cochrane himself, there were probably already quite enough loose cannons onboard already.