Charco Harbour

by Godfrey Blunden

Genres: General Fiction; Historical Fiction; Historical Mysteries

Synopsis

The story of the legendary Captain James Cook. It is 1768. War has broken out in Europe and the British Admiralty wants a base in the Western Pacific. So Captain James Cook and a company of nearly a hundred seamen and philosophers are despatched into those beautiful but perilous seas that lie between Terra Australis Incognita and the Great Barrier Reef, the never-before-penetrated realm of fin-back whales, sea-serpents, manatee, turtles and sharks, a maze of coral reefs and thousands of islets, some of which mysteriously send the compass needle spinning... Inevitably they are wrecked. After twenty-three hours on the rocks they claw-off and limp into a desolate mainland river estuary, greeted by cries of 'Charco!' from invisible inhabitants. For forty-nine days they are castaway in Charco Harbour, neaped by tides and imprisoned by contrary winds, making contact with one of the strangest and most mysterious of native societies, since lost to the world. In this closely-researched novel the reader will meet the Cook of the old logs and contemporary chronicles, the Cook who dominated mutinous crewmen and complaining passengers by sheer will and temper... the rall red-headed Yorkshiremen, the ex-collier's mate who could knock a man down with his fist, the flogging Captain, the Cook who neither drank nor smoked but could not resist peeping at native women through his spyglass... Cook the anti-hero, albeit the nonpareil of Navigators.

Release date: May 24, 2012

Publisher: Orion

Print pages: 395

Sample

With its high concave ceiling and the volute capitals of its impacted columns, its dim corners and dun furniture, the room had its own sound like the whisper of surf in a conch shell. It, too, was an enclave of the sea, a room full of rolled charts and the fine brass instruments of navigation, dog-eared folios of old voyages and water-stained log books heaped one upon another, signal flags and famous pennants, torn and powder-stained jacks, a great yellow globe in an oak cradle, ship models and scaled-down spars with this or that style of running rigging, miniature brass cannon in polished trunnions.

It was in the character of the room that it belonged to no single man, but to a race of men, its successive incumbents, so long as they lived, exercising the tolerated right, not of occupancy, but of inspection. This morning, as the new Lieutenant, the former Master of the Grenville schooner, was brought into the room by Mr Stephens, Secretary to the Admiralty, a number of men, some of them in the uniform of admirals, were engaged in a vigorous discussion over a map spread on a large table at the far side of the room.

Mr Stephens motioned to the Lieutenant to observe a respectful caution. ‘I see that the Earl has come in,’ he said.

One of the men at the table signed to the Lieutenant to wait. ‘That’s Captain Campbell, the Comptroller of the Navy,’ whispered Mr Stephens. ‘He wishes to speak with you.’

Mr Stephens laid a packet of papers on a writing table and then sat down at the table. The room smelled of madeira, snuffed candles and cordage, like a ship. The discussion at the table might have been taking place in the big cabin of a first-rate.

‘War is breaking out.’

The pronouncement, made by the old man, the Earl, took the Lieutenant by surprise.

‘The great empires of Russia and Turkey are engaged. Poland is the theatre of contention. The nearer parts of Europe are not yet directly engaged, but France, in consequence of a formal treaty with the Republic of Genoa, is now landing a considerable force in Corsica, in defiance of the Treaty of La Chapelle. The French king has also taken possession of the Pope’s territories in Avignon.How are we to regard these actions other than as the product of that strict union which now binds the different branches of the House of Bourbon and their close conjunction with the Houses of Austria and Portugal? An alliance, already too powerful, holds all of southern Europe against us.’

Though the old man, the Earl, spoke with the utmost severity, the effect of his words was a noticeable raising of spirits among the admirals.

‘In America,’ the Earl went on, ‘the temper and conduct of the people becomes every day more licentious. That republican spirit to which this colony owes its foundations, and the levelling principles in which its inhabitants are immured, are being operated on by factious and designing men. Measures imposed by our sovereign parliament they chose to regard as totally subversive of their rights and appear incapable of prescribing due limit to their passions or of preserving a proper decency in expressing them.’

‘The Stamp Act has been repealed! What else do they want?’ said one of the Admirals.

‘It is with Britons in politics as it is in the field, their courage increases with their wounds.’

‘Damme, Sir, but there’s truth in that!’

Captain Campbell detached himself from the group around the table and came over to the Lieutenant.

‘Come in for tha instructions, eh?’

‘Yes, Sir.’

The Comptroller of the Navy, who was also Captain of the king’s yacht, Mary, was a short thick-set man of about forty-six, with blunt manners and a wry sarcasm. He had been a master’s mate with Anson in the Centurion when the Manila Galleon had been captured with its treasure of two million pieces of eight; as captain of the Bellona he had taken the Grand Biche; he had been one of the members of the court martial which had tried the piratical sailors of the Chesterfield. All this the Lieutenant knew, as who did not.

‘I hae summat to tell ye,’ the Comptroller said. ‘It’s about swoins.’

‘I know it.’

‘Ye does now? Then yere cleverer than I was when I went out to the Pacific. We buried five hundred and twenty-six out of the nine hundred and sixty-two men in the three ships. All scorbutic. I say as if we’d had swoins we’d hae saved the most of them. Ye ferment the meal in water and then boil it up with thick porridge and eat it with wine and sugar.’

‘We has a supply of wort on board, Sir, in pursuance of your instructions. We also has swoins, though I places most confidence in scurvy grass.’

‘An’ where in the devil does ye think ye’ll be getting scurvy grass in that great waste of waters?’

The old man, the Earl, was talking: ‘Yes, France, of whom it is justly averred that there has not been a drop of human blood spilt in war in the remotest corner of Europe, but was directly or indirectly due to her cabals, conspires to foment rebellion in America. And beside France is Spain, burning with her own humiliations.’

‘We need ports,’ one of the admirals said.

‘Have we not reason to fear,’ the old man said, ‘that, with the debt enormously increased, we shall not only have the preparation of our conquests to provide for, but even the very extermination of our nation to defend.’

As the whisper within the conch shell vanishes in the vicinity of a real surf, so the inner harmony of the great room was momentarily diminished by the sounds of London, the clatter of hoofs and the squeak of carriage springs, a climbing boy’s shrill tenor: ‘To sweep for the soot, ho!’

Comptroller Campbell, looking into the Lieutenant’s face, noted the tiny blue scar of an old coal-dusted contusion.

‘I see, tha wert in the coal trade,’ he said.

‘I were mate of the Friendship at one time.’

‘’Twere the press brought ye into the service, eh?’

‘Na, ’twere the prizemoney.’

The Comptroller laughed. ‘Spoken like a geordie,’ he said.

‘I means no disrespect to the service,’ the Lieutenant said.

‘Ah, mun, without the coal trade there would be naught for the press gangs. I mind that was how I come in. Our cat was at Wapping stairs and they were seizing a big fellow who had a wife and childer back in Berwick and he were weeping and begging off, so I says to the King’s officer, “There, take me instead,” and the officer, he says, “Aye, my lad, that I will, for I would rather have a boy of spirit than a blubbering man, come along!” My face was as black as a hat and my knuckles would knock the hoops off a barrel; I were small, but I were hard. ’Spect you were the same.’

‘I were older when I came to the sea,’ the Lieutenant said. ‘I were eighteen already.’

‘And what year was that?’

‘The year ‘forty-six.’

‘Ah, that year!’

‘I were but just bound a three years servant to Mr Sanderson, the shopkeeper in Staithes, and when I ne’er came back after that Christmas, he said that I had taken the king’s shilling. But he were wrong.’

‘Many took the king’s shilling that year.’

‘I served my time in the Walker ships.’

‘That I know,’ said the Comptroller, with a mischievous expression. ‘For when they got ye in the service, ye didna forgit to write to John Walker for a reference, did ye now! And it were Walker’s letter that persuaded Captain Hamer to rate ye master’s mate in the Eagle. And, later, there was that M.P. for Scarborough writing to the Admiralty on your behalf; but ye was forgivin for it, John Walker being the spring of it, a good man.’

‘I see that Commodore Palliser has posted you on me, Sir.’

‘Yes, yes, Palliser’s riled at losin’ ye. But he doesna’ hold it agin ye, for his own ambition be too great for him not to appreciate it in another.’

There was no disapprobation in the Comptroller’s irony: that the man standing before him had, as a mere warrant officer, been able to enlist a powerful interest in his behalf was evidence of a certain kind of ability well respected in the Royal Navy. The Comptroller could see how the man’s steadiness had won the heart of John Walker, the Quaker shipowner, and the regard of the late Captain Simcoe, commander of the Pembroke man-o’-war; but the Comptroller was puzzled by the source or spring, as he called it, of that influence which, to the man’s great benefit, had but recently reached down from an exalted place.

The Lieutenant was a man of forty, an advanced age for a newly-commissioned officer. Several inches above six feet in height, he wore his new uniform awkwardly, thigh and calf moulding the white breeches and stockings. His voice was storm-edged. His hands were grappling hooks, his face weathered brick; in this room of powdered periwigs his shock of natural chestnut hair was like a sunburst. Patently his address had not brought him preferment.

He had served well in the Seven Years’ War, though there had been some dispute with Admiral Saunders over the placing of the catts at Quebec, the Comptroller remembered. For the past four years he had been employed as Master of the Grenville survey schooner, engaged in laying down the coasts of Newfoundland, one of the tasks of the naval squadron, commanded by Commodore Palliser, which was consolidating British occupancy of the island, conceded by the Treaty of Paris. Now, suddenly, the Master of the Grenville had been withdrawn from this employment and given a king’s commission and a king’s ship of discovery. Why?

The Lieutenant was aware of the Comptroller’s unspoken question and was in no mind to answer it; Commodore Palliser’s curiosity had been more trenchantly expressed, but it had not been gratified either.

The question was coupled with reports – provoked, some said, by the circulation of a private journal – inferring ill-treatment and total neglect of a distinguished guest by the Newfoundland squadron. The Commodore could only reply that he had had no knowledge of Mr Joseph Banks’ presence in the squadron that season: ‘If someone had told me that young Banks was with us, I would have done everything in my power to have made him comfortable. My own surgeon would have attended to his ague. And, instead of being continuously seasick in those stinking fishing shallops, he could have had my smartest tender for voyaging about.’ Actually, Mr Joseph Banks had been the private guest of Lieutenant Phipps, the future Lord Mulgrave, on board the Niger frigate, inconnu for his own reasons, and so aloof in manner and modest in habit, so zealous in the pursuit of natural curiosities, that the officers had misjudged his rank. ‘How was I to know,’ Commodore Palliser had said ruefully, ‘that Banks owns forty thousand acres of Lincolnshire, coal mines in Staffordshire and steel forges in Hallamshire? How could I be expected to know that the family is under the protection of the Berties, that Banks is connected by marriage with the Grenvilles and Exeter, that Montague is in his debt?’ Alas, the damage was done: stories were being told about the vulgar pretension of the Coronation Ball in the Commodore’s flagship and – one story he did not at all like – about the Commodore having called the ship to action stations one foggy morning on account of a peculiar noise made by a species of aquatic bird called whobbies.

The same source – the private journal in flowing feminine script – had revealed that Mr Banks had taken, on the eve of his departure from St John’s, a very pleasurable trip in one of the Commodore’s tenders, a small vessel left unnamed, but easily identified by his precise description of her as the Grenville schooner. That young Banks was the spring which had raised the Master of the Grenville schooner to his present eminence there was no doubt; but how had this connection been established in so brief a time and why so passionately pursued?

‘And now,’ Comptroller Campbell was saying, ‘there is George Jackson, Judge Advocate of the Fleet, who says that you were born on his estate in Normanby and that it were his sister, a Mrs Skottowe, who got you your letters.’

‘No, Sir! ’Twere my own mother, labouring in the Hall and in the fields for paying what it cost at Mr Pullen’s poor school at Ayton.’

Seeing the pink flush now staining the Lieutenant’s temples, the Comptroller understood that nothing would break this reserve. ‘There now, don’t take on so, Lieutenant! People only remember these things when you’re famous.’

‘Famous, say ye?’

‘’Tisna’ every day that we send a ship round the world on a confidential mission.’

‘Round the world!’ The Lieutenant’s surprise was complete.

‘Ye thought ye was in for a short run down to the south latitudes, eh, now, Lieutenant? A peep at Venus and home for Whitsun? Is that what ye thought?’

This indeed was what the Lieutenant had thought: not to be back by Whitsun perhaps, but a voyage of nine months or a year, not more.

The Comptroller nodded in the direction of the discussion at the big table. ‘’Tis interesting and consarns ye, in a way,’ he said.

The Sea Lords, their number augmented, were bent over a large map, most of it blank.

‘The Falklands has only to be attacked in order to be lost,’ said a Rear Admiral of the Blue. ‘The political men will yield it as they yielded Manila, our gateway to the Pacific.’

‘I am entirely of the opinion,’ said the old man, the Earl, ‘as to the ignominy and folly of making conquests only to restore them.’

‘A squadron in the Pacific will foil all their schemes,’ said an Admiral of the Red. ‘It would be a threat to their trade with Peru and Chile and, being feared in California, would caution the support of adventures eastward in North America.’

‘Where then do we base a squadron in the Pacific?’

‘Juan Fernandez?’

The Comptroller spoke and was heard with attention: ‘At Juan Fernandez the ground is foul and the winds unfavourable. It took the Tryal a month to make up to the island.’

‘China?’

‘We went up to Canton in the Centurion for refitting and refreshment, but the Chinee is a deceitful and delaying customer and to get away we had to run out our guns.’

‘On this great ocean, no port, no place that is British!’ said an Admiral of the White. ‘’Tis a great culpability.’

‘What of that Port Royal, discovered by Wallis in the island which he named King George’s land.’ The speaker, an Admiral of the Red, addressed the Lieutenant directly. ‘You have spoken with Wallis, what does he say of Port Royal?’

The Lieutenant answered shortly: ‘Wallis says that at best it is but a poor anchorage, there being no protection from the north or the west.’

‘No need to shout, Lieutenant. And it’s Captain Wallis.’

‘It wants a port south of the line, but not so far south as to lose advantage of the trade winds,’ the Comptroller said.

An admiral said: ‘We are again reduced to seeking this port described by Quiros. Byron beat about the latitude without coming up with it. Wallis did not attempt it and Carteret we have not heard from.’ The speaker half-turned towards the Lieutenant: ‘Our recent circumnavigators have shown a lamentable disposition to sail home at the earliest possible moment and by the shortest route. It is simple: you get into the south-east trade and you run down your westing to the Moluccas or the China Sea.’

The Lieutenant suddenly understood that, so far as the Admiralty was concerned, the expedition to observe the Transit of Venus from an island in the South Pacific was but an excuse, a cloak perhaps, for an inquiry of far wider scope and importance. He saw why there had been so much resentment of his getting the command: the task the Sea Lords had in mind was one suited to a professional officer of their own class and rank, one in whom they could have full confidence. The Lieutenant, of course, had no illusions about how he had obtained the ship: Mr Banks had deployed what must have been a considerable influence at the very highest level.

Commodore Palliser had made no bones about what the Navy had thought of the matter. During the little ceremony of handing over the Lieutenant’s commission a few weeks earlier, the Commodore had said: ‘Do you know what they are saying, Lieutenant? They are saying that Banks has arranged to go to sea under conditions that make it unlikely that he will be subjected to any disagreeable form of control! Do you understand, Lieutenant?’

The Lieutenant had understood.

A huge volume was lying open before one of the admirals. ‘Quiros describes it as a bay capable of holding a thousand ships,’ the admiral said, ‘so well sheltered that in all winds the sea is calm. He says that the coast up to the mountains is covered with trees plenty of spars there – with scores of fields and fast rivers, all very fertile and populous. He says that fish and cattle are plentiful and he speaks of coconuts and plantains.’ The admiral raised his head. ‘In short, gentlemen, a port capable of victualling far more than a squadron!’

The Spaniards went there, seeking slaves for their mines in Peru, but found the people too easy and indolent.’

‘The French will rediscover this excellent port, you may be sure. I hear that the Chevalier de Bougainville, who was so busy in the Falklands, is bound for the Pacific; and they are fitting out someone called Surville.’

‘In the opinion of Mr Dalrymple …’

‘Dalrymple!’ cried the old man, the Earl. ‘That subaltern of private interest! It would certainly be doing him too much honour to allow him an opinion at all, at least his own!’

‘The Southern Continent …’

‘I believe that we would have heard from those fifty million people ere now, had they existed. What think you, Campbell?’

‘’Tis no time for general discovery, Sir. Where is the power and the money to come from? Where are the men and the ships?’

The admiral with the book before him spoke: ‘The way to come up with this coast is from the south. All the latest maps – those of Bellini and de Bauche and that of the French Royal Cartographer, de Vaugondy – lay down a coast linking New Holland and the land discovered by Quiros. It is true that Quiros was told of a greater land lying to southward of his discovery.’

‘Ah, if we but had that agreeable harbour, our whole strategy would be changed,’ said the old man.

The discussion had ended. Mr Stephens came over to the table.

‘Gentlemen,’ he said, ‘the Lieutenant awaits his instructions.’

‘Now, then, Hawke,’ said the old man.

At the secretarial table Lord Hawke, incumbent First Lord, pushed several envelopes towards the Lieutenant.

‘These are your instructions,’ he said. ‘You will open them when you are at sea, as indicated, the one being general and the other secret. A close reading will convince you of an important difference between them.’

The Lieutenant took up the envelopes. They weighed heavily.

‘You have a further document here,’ said Mr Stephens, ‘which you are to present to such of His Majesty’s officers, senior to you in rank, who may ask to see your papers. It absolves you from showing them. Of course, should you be boarded by hostile forces, you are to destroy all papers immediately.’

‘I have often wondered why Stephens insists on so much jolly bunting,’ the old man said. ‘I suspect that it’s because sealing wax is his lifeblood.’ The old man did not smile.

‘The whole town knows whither thou art bound,’ the Comptroller said.

‘But not whence I goes from thence,’ the Lieutenant said.

‘You will find even less about that in your instructions,’ said Lord Hawke. ‘The quality of these papers is to be judged by what they don’t say.’

The Sea Lords and their Admirals, gathered round for the little ceremony, exchanged glances of complicity.

‘You are ordered to Port Royal for the Transit. You are to proceed southward to the fortieth degree of latitude and, should you not have come up with the Southern Continent, you are ordered to fall in with Tasman’s New Zealand and to survey the coasts of that country. You are to do what has to be done in these places and that is all.’

‘Dost mean, Sir, that I am to find my own way home?’

‘By way of the Cape of Good Hope or by way of Cape Horn. You, in consultation with your officers, are to judge which route is the more eligible. Your decision will depend on the condition of the ship and the health of the people. On consideration of this the Commissioners assume that you will set a course for some port – they do not name it – where you may procure a sufficiency to carry you to England by either of these routes.’

The Lieutenant was thinking that he had been put in a position which made possible no other course than that of running up the coast of New Holland to connect with the great bay described by Quiros.

‘I understand, Sirs. I think I know my duty.’

The answer pleased the assembled gentlemen.

‘One last point, Lieutenant. There will, no doubt, be a good deal of journal-keeping in the ship. You are to take charge of all such records before reaching the first civilised port.’

The Lieutenant’s embarrassment was obvious.

‘Sir, it would be a great relief and convenience if you were so to inform Mr Banks.’

The Lieutenant’s embarrassment amused the admirals. Several laughed in a peculiar way. The Lieutenant recognised the brand of their humour without fully understanding it. Commodore Palliser had been amused in the same degree, that day he had handed the Lieutenant his commission, telling him that people were saying that Mr Banks had arranged to go to sea under conditions that would impose no restraint upon him, and the Lieutenant saying that he had understood. ‘I wonder if you do understand,’ the Commodore had said. ‘Have you read Roderick Random? Never heard of it, of course! Nor of the infamous Lord Strutwell! A pestilential book, but Mr Smollett makes very plain the trouble that can be caused aboard a king’s ship by over-dressed young gentlemen of eccentric tastes, especially when they have great fortunes and friends in high places.’ The Lieutenant’s reply had astonished the Commodore. ‘Yes, Sir,’ he had said. ‘Mr Banks does not want to be outranked or teased by his own quality.’

The Sea Lords were still chuckling.

The old man, the Earl, said: ‘Not my young friend Banks’ journal. You are absolved from troubling about that. Indeed, it may be of some use to you.’

It’s Latitude and Longitude we would have you guard, not lizards and lichens,’ said the Comptroller.

Glasses appeared and, to an agreeable relaxation, the voyage was toasted and hands shaken. The Lieutenant thought it a strange little ceremony, so stiff, yet so moving, so much of him taken into confidence, and yet so much held under pain of fulfilment.

The Comptroller accompanied the Lieutenant out of the Admiralty. The conch shell’s soft sound was suddenly lost to the distant rumble of riot, of thousands of feet marching to drum and fife and hoarse voices syllabising, ‘Wilkes and Liberty!’

‘Ye has the list for geographical christenings?’ the Comptroller asked. ‘Bedford, Grafton, Hillsborough, Weymouth and that lot. The politicians.’

‘Yes I has it.’

‘We’ll go over it on your return. There are sure to be some names as has fallen out of favour. But not all, for we are now embarked on a steady course. Let me suggest, Lieutenant, that, on the first strange coast you come upon, you name, say, a large open-mouthed bay for Lord Hawke and possibly a very high mountain for the old man, the Earl, Egmont.’

The Lieutenant nodded, and said: ‘When you were out in the Centurion, how long was it?’

‘We was four years out.’

‘You was married, had childer?’

‘Not then.’

They shook hands and the Lieutenant took a chair to Shadwell.

It was Saturday: the city had been in a sullen mood since the hanging of the seven Irish coalheavers in Sun Tavern Fields on Wednesday. A guard of three hundred soldiers and a prodigious number of peace officers were still doing duty about Wapping and Shadwell. Armed tenders and government cutters had been brought up the river and now lay off Deptford. All weapons in the possession of public gunsmiths and a large amount of arms held by the East India Company had been seized and deposited in the Tower. It was raining when the Lieutenant left the Admiralty building and the streets were running slush. The Lieutenant urged all haste on the two stout but stockingless Irishmen who raised the shafts of the sedan-chair: the Lieutenant had his sailing orders and he wanted to get out to the open sea.

Just over seven months had elapsed since he had brought the damaged Grenville up the Thames to Deptford. They had been anchored off the Nore in heavy weather, but their anchors had dragged and they had tailed on Knock shoal, striking hard and lying down on their larboard bilges; during a lull in the gale they had got out a spare anchor and had clawed-off. When a man comes in from the sea with the wind still roaring in his ears, his visage seamed with salt, his jacket frozen, the land cannot be stranger to his senses than it is. He had docked in a river whose further reaches resembled a glacier in almost every respect, including a morainal debris of masonry and crushed boats. He had been told, without having been impressed, that it was the worst winter in living memory: the crops had failed and there was famine in this and other lands. Then, little by little, the shore had embraced him: the conversation of his wife and their friends, seamen’s talk and tavern gossip, finally the evidence of his eyes and ears had proved the logic of the land’s otherness.

He had heard complaints about the edicts which the king had passed for the free importation, and exportation, of corn from America; he had heard dire curses directed at the forestallers, regrators and engrossers, as the profiteers were called. Many magistrates had condoned the orderly taking-over of the mills by unauthorised persons and the retailing of the flour at pre-famine prices. A fortnight after his arrival, mobs of journeymen weavers, made redundant by the growing use of engine-looms, had descended on the weaving houses, destroying looms and beating up the machine weavers. Brought out to quell these disorders, the Scots Guards had fought pitched battles with the weavers in Spital-fields.

Through some remissness the civil power seemed to have lost its force and energy, despite more than three hundred criminals, men and women, having been condemned to death, mostly for theft, at the several assizes; and if one-third of the sentences had been commuted, the country had rid itself of these trouble-makers too by having sent them to labour for seven years on the plantations of Maryland and Virginia. A greater number of lesser criminals had been branded in the hand, publicly or privately whipped, and one, Anne Sowerby, having been capitally convicted at the York assizes, had been afterwards burnt; but this was for having poisoned her husband, a heinous crime.

In February, Mr Wilkes had returned to London after four years of exile in France. Simultaneously the cry had been heard all over London: ‘Wilkes and Liberty!’ At the Guildhall elections Mr Wilkes’ bid to obtain one of the four parliamentary seats representing the City had failed on a poll-count; instead, Mr William Beckford, a Billingsgate alderman, had got the seat. At the general elections at the end of March, Mr Wilkes, through pressure exercised by a vast popular support, had been elected for the county of Middlesex.

Mr Wilkes’ return to political life evidently had more than popular support; but it was the fortuitous coincidence of misery which had given Mr Wilkes his most feared and ruthless instrument of leverage. Almost five years had elapsed since the publication of the last number of his journal North Briton and few knew its contents, except that it had been an argument for ministerial responsibility. But its serial number had suddenly assumed symbolic meaning. In the poorer quarters of London people had worn blue cockades for Mr Wilkes and the number 45 had been painted on every accessible wall, on placards, on the Austrian Ambassador’s boots. A parallel symbolism had demanded that the great houses show lighted windows in honour of Wilkes, the darkened house being sure to have its windows broke or its owners, as had happened to the Duke and Duchess of Northumberland, brought into the street and forced to drink Mr Wilkes’ health.

Great precautions had been taken to preserve the public safety when Mr Wilkes had submitted himself to the court of King’s bench in April in connection with outstanding judgments against him for having re-issued his banned journal and what he himself had described as a ‘ludicrous poem’. The magistrates at West-minister had been at their stations with constables on call at every part; two battalions of the Guards had laid on their arms in St James’s Park and in St George’s-fields; those at the Tower and the Savoy had been kept ready to march at ten minutes’ notice. Mr Wilkes had made an elegant speech in defence of his two publications, supported by distinguished counsel; the Lord Chief Justice had dismissed the case on a technical point and Mr Wilkes had been cheered as he had left the court and gone across to Wag-horn’s coffee house: the memorable drama of that day–the 20th of April–had occurred at Shadwell.

Much of the Lieutenant’s shore life had been spent i