H. M. S. Cockerel, page 46
Joseph Conrad wrote a novel, The Rover, which concerned the fate of the Royalists, featuring a young girl driven mad by the Terror, the slaughter, the permanent exile of those unfortunate émigrés driven overseas to any port that would have them, like storm petrels, of families and loved ones forever separated by sailing on different ships to disparate corners of the earth. If you can find it in the classics section, read the tale of poor, mad Arlette, victim of the Revolution. And of Toulon.
Lady Emma Hamilton, indeed, could never resist a sailor. After he first met her in 1793, Horatio Nelson was perhaps more besotted by Emma than most biographers suspect—or care to admit. Did he, or did he not, that early? After his stunning victory at the Battle of the Nile, Emma threw herself at his feet, and he gladly picked her up. They remained lovers, public or professional opinions be-damned, until his death in 1805 on Victory ’s quarterdeck at the Battle of Trafalgar.
Emma Hamilton was a sad case; she really did think of all those men, who’d used her then cast her aside, as her true, long-time friends and mentors. And we believe the depiction herein of this deluded lady is correct, especially Emma Hamilton’s desire to tag onto the coattails of powerful and influential men and bask in their reflected, shared glories.
By the way, what Charles Greville paid for, that Fetherstonehaugh would not, was a baby, left in foster-care at Neston, and never reclaimed—by either parent.
There was a Sans Culottes in the French Navy, but she didn’t keep that name for long. Originally the Dauphin-Royal, she was a 120-gun 1st Rate. Cooler heads prevailed at last, the wily politicians who took over the French Revolution from the wild-eyed radicals and might have been a touch embarrassed by the earlier revolutionaries’ fervour. She became the Orient, and served as the ill-fated Admiral de Brueys’s flagship at the Battle of the Nile, where she burned and blew up in 1797, prompting that horridly sentimental poem, “The Boy Stood on The Burning Deck, whence all but he had fled” . . . or something like that. Imagine, if you will, a proud and noble forty-four-gun frigate of the fledgling United States Navy being christened USS Tory Thumper, and picture how quickly one might wish to thump the man who so named her up-side the head. Then get on to something more suitable, such as Constitution.
Lastly, before anyone gets exceeding wroth with the author and wastes postage or toll charges upon irate phone calls or scathing diatribes, allow him to plead dramatic license. Capt. William Bligh was still at Jamaica, having just delivered his breadfruit, at long last, in the Indiaman Providence. There was no way he could have been in London, nor at the Admiralty, to meet our boy Lewrie in late January 1793. You know this. The author, more to the point, knows this. But since mutiny, revolution and all were indeed the spirit of the age, Bligh’s appearance in the tale neatly foreshadows that which came later aboard Cockerel, and in France and at Toulon. There, satisfied, now? Besides, it was a slow morning for the author, too, when he wrote that, and he couldn’t help himself.
So, there is Cdr. Alan Lewrie, master and commander into a proper King’s Ship, husband, father, lover, scared so bad he would not trust his own arse with a fart . . . ! What will Sophie de Maubeuge say to Caroline in future? How will he juggle wife and family on one hand, and the stunning Phoebe Aretino on the other? Will it last? Will the kitten ever stop nuzzling his ear, or catch a mouse? Will Alan retain the good opinion people seem to have of him, at the moment, anyway?
Most importantly, what sort of adventures . . . and troubles . . . will he get into next? We think we know . . . but we’re not telling. Yet.
Dewey Lambdin, H. M. S. Cockerel
