

Transcribed from the 1901 Charles Scribner’s Sons edition by David Price,
email ccx074@pglaf.org





                                  MEMOIR
                                    OF
                             FLEEMING JENKIN


                                * * * * *

                                    BY
                          ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON

                                * * * * *

                                 NEW YORK
                         CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS
                                   1901




PREFACE TO THE AMERICAN EDITION.


ON the death of Fleeming Jenkin, his family and friends determined to
publish a selection of his various papers; by way of introduction, the
following pages were drawn up; and the whole, forming two considerable
volumes, has been issued in England.  In the States, it has not been
thought advisable to reproduce the whole; and the memoir appearing alone,
shorn of that other matter which was at once its occasion and its
justification, so large an account of a man so little known may seem to a
stranger out of all proportion.  But Jenkin was a man much more
remarkable than the mere bulk or merit of his work approves him.  It was
in the world, in the commerce of friendship, by his brave attitude
towards life, by his high moral value and unwearied intellectual effort,
that he struck the minds of his contemporaries.  His was an individual
figure, such as authors delight to draw, and all men to read of, in the
pages of a novel.  His was a face worth painting for its own sake.  If
the sitter shall not seem to have justified the portrait, if Jenkin,
after his death, shall not continue to make new friends, the fault will
be altogether mine.

                                                                   R. L S.

SARANAC, _Oct._, 1887.




CHAPTER I.


The Jenkins of Stowting—Fleeming’s grandfather—Mrs. Buckner’s
fortune—Fleeming’s father; goes to sea; at St. Helena; meets King Tom;
service in the West Indies; end of his career—The
Campbell-Jacksons—Fleeming’s mother—Fleeming’s uncle John.

IN the reign of Henry VIII., a family of the name of Jenkin, claiming to
come from York, and bearing the arms of Jenkin ap Philip of St. Melans,
are found reputably settled in the county of Kent.  Persons of strong
genealogical pinion pass from William Jenkin, Mayor of Folkestone in
1555, to his contemporary ‘John Jenkin, of the Citie of York, Receiver
General of the County,’ and thence, by way of Jenkin ap Philip, to the
proper summit of any Cambrian pedigree—a prince; ‘Guaith Voeth, Lord of
Cardigan,’ the name and style of him.  It may suffice, however, for the
present, that these Kentish Jenkins must have undoubtedly derived from
Wales, and being a stock of some efficiency, they struck root and grew to
wealth and consequence in their new home.

Of their consequence we have proof enough in the fact that not only was
William Jenkin (as already mentioned) Mayor of Folkestone in 1555, but no
less than twenty-three times in the succeeding century and a half, a
Jenkin (William, Thomas, Henry, or Robert) sat in the same place of
humble honour.  Of their wealth we know that in the reign of Charles I.,
Thomas Jenkin of Eythorne was more than once in the market buying land,
and notably, in 1633, acquired the manor of Stowting Court.  This was an
estate of some 320 acres, six miles from Hythe, in the Bailiwick and
Hundred of Stowting, and the Lathe of Shipway, held of the Crown _in
capite_ by the service of six men and a constable to defend the passage
of the sea at Sandgate.  It had a chequered history before it fell into
the hands of Thomas of Eythorne, having been sold and given from one to
another—to the Archbishop, to Heringods, to the Burghershes, to Pavelys,
Trivets, Cliffords, Wenlocks, Beauchamps, Nevilles, Kempes, and Clarkes:
a piece of Kentish ground condemned to see new faces and to be no man’s
home.  But from 1633 onward it became the anchor of the Jenkin family in
Kent; and though passed on from brother to brother, held in shares
between uncle and nephew, burthened by debts and jointures, and at least
once sold and bought in again, it remains to this day in the hands of the
direct line.  It is not my design, nor have I the necessary knowledge, to
give a history of this obscure family.  But this is an age when genealogy
has taken a new lease of life, and become for the first time a human
science; so that we no longer study it in quest of the Guaith Voeths, but
to trace out some of the secrets of descent and destiny; and as we study,
we think less of Sir Bernard Burke and more of Mr. Galton.  Not only do
our character and talents lie upon the anvil and receive their temper
during generations; but the very plot of our life’s story unfolds itself
on a scale of centuries, and the biography of the man is only an episode
in the epic of the family.  From this point of view I ask the reader’s
leave to begin this notice of a remarkable man who was my friend, with
the accession of his great-grandfather, John Jenkin.

This John Jenkin, a grandson of Damaris Kingsley, of the family of
‘Westward Ho!’ was born in 1727, and married Elizabeth, daughter of
Thomas Frewen, of Church House, Northiam.  The Jenkins had now been long
enough intermarrying with their Kentish neighbours to be Kentish folk
themselves in all but name; and with the Frewens in particular their
connection is singularly involved.  John and his wife were each descended
in the third degree from another Thomas Frewen, Vicar of Northiam, and
brother to Accepted Frewen, Archbishop of York.  John’s mother had
married a Frewen for a second husband.  And the last complication was to
be added by the Bishop of Chichester’s brother, Charles Buckner,
Vice-Admiral of the White, who was twice married, first to a paternal
cousin of Squire John, and second to Anne, only sister of the Squire’s
wife, and already the widow of another Frewen.  The reader must bear Mrs.
Buckner in mind; it was by means of that lady that Fleeming Jenkin began
life as a poor man.  Meanwhile, the relationship of any Frewen to any
Jenkin at the end of these evolutions presents a problem almost
insoluble; and we need not wonder if Mrs. John, thus exercised in her
immediate circle, was in her old age ‘a great genealogist of all Sussex
families, and much consulted.’  The names Frewen and Jenkin may almost
seem to have been interchangeable at will; and yet Fate proceeds with
such particularity that it was perhaps on the point of name that the
family was ruined.

The John Jenkins had a family of one daughter and five extravagant and
unpractical sons.  The eldest, Stephen, entered the Church and held the
living of Salehurst, where he offered, we may hope, an extreme example of
the clergy of the age.  He was a handsome figure of a man; jovial and
jocular; fond of his garden, which produced under his care the finest
fruits of the neighbourhood; and like all the family, very choice in
horses.  He drove tandem; like Jehu, furiously.  His saddle horse,
Captain (for the names of horses are piously preserved in the family
chronicle which I follow), was trained to break into a gallop as soon as
the vicar’s foot was thrown across its back; nor would the rein be drawn
in the nine miles between Northiam and the Vicarage door.  Debt was the
man’s proper element; he used to skulk from arrest in the chancel of his
church; and the speed of Captain may have come sometimes handy.  At an
early age this unconventional parson married his cook, and by her he had
two daughters and one son.  One of the daughters died unmarried; the
other imitated her father, and married ‘imprudently.’  The son, still
more gallantly continuing the tradition, entered the army, loaded himself
with debt, was forced to sell out, took refuge in the Marines, and was
lost on the Dogger Bank in the war-ship _Minotaur_.  If he did not marry
below him, like his father, his sister, and a certain great-uncle
William, it was perhaps because he never married at all.

The second brother, Thomas, who was employed in the General Post-Office,
followed in all material points the example of Stephen, married ‘not very
creditably,’ and spent all the money he could lay his hands on.  He died
without issue; as did the fourth brother, John, who was of weak intellect
and feeble health, and the fifth brother, William, whose brief career as
one of Mrs. Buckner’s satellites will fall to be considered later on.  So
soon, then, as the _Minotaur_ had struck upon the Dogger Bank, Stowting
and the line of the Jenkin family fell on the shoulders of the third
brother, Charles.

Facility and self-indulgence are the family marks; facility (to judge by
these imprudent marriages) being at once their quality and their defect;
but in the case of Charles, a man of exceptional beauty and sweetness
both of face and disposition, the family fault had quite grown to be a
virtue, and we find him in consequence the drudge and milk-cow of his
relatives.  Born in 1766, Charles served at sea in his youth, and smelt
both salt water and powder.  The Jenkins had inclined hitherto, as far as
I can make out, to the land service.  Stephen’s son had been a soldier;
William (fourth of Stowting) had been an officer of the unhappy
Braddock’s in America, where, by the way, he owned and afterwards sold an
estate on the James River, called, after the parental seat; of which I
should like well to hear if it still bears the name.  It was probably by
the influence of Captain Buckner, already connected with the family by
his first marriage, that Charles Jenkin turned his mind in the direction
of the navy; and it was in Buckner’s own ship, the _Prothée_, 64, that
the lad made his only campaign.  It was in the days of Rodney’s war, when
the _Prothée_, we read, captured two large privateers to windward of
Barbadoes, and was ‘materially and distinguishedly engaged’ in both the
actions with De Grasse.  While at sea Charles kept a journal, and made
strange archaic pilot-book sketches, part plan, part elevation, some of
which survive for the amusement of posterity.  He did a good deal of
surveying, so that here we may perhaps lay our finger on the beginning of
Fleeming’s education as an engineer.  What is still more strange, among
the relics of the handsome midshipman and his stay in the gun-room of the
_Prothée_, I find a code of signals graphically represented, for all the
world as it would have been done by his grandson.

On the declaration of peace, Charles, because he had suffered from
scurvy, received his mother’s orders to retire; and he was not the man to
refuse a request, far less to disobey a command.  Thereupon he turned
farmer, a trade he was to practice on a large scale; and we find him
married to a Miss Schirr, a woman of some fortune, the daughter of a
London merchant.  Stephen, the not very reverend, was still alive,
galloping about the country or skulking in his chancel.  It does not
appear whether he let or sold the paternal manor to Charles; one or
other, it must have been; and the sailor-farmer settled at Stowting, with
his wife, his mother, his unmarried sister, and his sick brother John.
Out of the six people of whom his nearest family consisted, three were in
his own house, and two others (the horse-leeches, Stephen and Thomas) he
appears to have continued to assist with more amiability than wisdom.  He
hunted, belonged to the Yeomanry, owned famous horses, Maggie and Lucy,
the latter coveted by royalty itself.  ‘Lord Rokeby, his neighbour,
called him kinsman,’ writes my artless chronicler, ‘and altogether life
was very cheery.’  At Stowting his three sons, John, Charles, and Thomas
Frewen, and his younger daughter, Anna, were all born to him; and the
reader should here be told that it is through the report of this second
Charles (born 1801) that he has been looking on at these confused
passages of family history.

In the year 1805 the ruin of the Jenkins was begun.  It was the work of a
fallacious lady already mentioned, Aunt Anne Frewen, a sister of Mrs.
John.  Twice married, first to her cousin Charles Frewen, clerk to the
Court of Chancery, Brunswick Herald, and Usher of the Black Rod, and
secondly to Admiral Buckner, she was denied issue in both beds, and being
very rich—she died worth about 60,000_l._, mostly in land—she was in
perpetual quest of an heir.  The mirage of this fortune hung before
successive members of the Jenkin family until her death in 1825, when it
dissolved and left the latest Alnaschar face to face with bankruptcy.
The grandniece, Stephen’s daughter, the one who had not ‘married
imprudently,’ appears to have been the first; for she was taken abroad by
the golden aunt, and died in her care at Ghent in 1792.  Next she adopted
William, the youngest of the five nephews; took him abroad with her—it
seems as if that were in the formula; was shut up with him in Paris by
the Revolution; brought him back to Windsor, and got him a place in the
King’s Body-Guard, where he attracted the notice of George III. by his
proficiency in German.  In 1797, being on guard at St. James’s Palace,
William took a cold which carried him off; and Aunt Anne was once more
left heirless.  Lastly, in 1805, perhaps moved by the Admiral, who had a
kindness for his old midshipman, perhaps pleased by the good looks and
the good nature of the man himself, Mrs. Buckner turned her eyes upon
Charles Jenkin.  He was not only to be the heir, however, he was to be
the chief hand in a somewhat wild scheme of family farming.  Mrs. Jenkin,
the mother, contributed 164 acres of land; Mrs. Buckner, 570, some at
Northiam, some farther off; Charles let one-half of Stowting to a tenant,
and threw the other and various scattered parcels into the common
enterprise; so that the whole farm amounted to near upon a thousand
acres, and was scattered over thirty miles of country.  The ex-seaman of
thirty-nine, on whose wisdom and ubiquity the scheme depended, was to
live in the meanwhile without care or fear.  He was to check himself in
nothing; his two extravagances, valuable horses and worthless brothers,
were to be indulged in comfort; and whether the year quite paid itself or
not, whether successive years left accumulated savings or only a growing
deficit, the fortune of the golden aunt should in the end repair all.

On this understanding Charles Jenkin transported his family to Church
House, Northiam: Charles the second, then a child of three, among the
number.  Through the eyes of the boy we have glimpses of the life that
followed: of Admiral and Mrs. Buckner driving up from Windsor in a coach
and six, two post-horses and their own four; of the house full of
visitors, the great roasts at the fire, the tables in the servants’ hall
laid for thirty or forty for a month together; of the daily press of
neighbours, many of whom, Frewens, Lords, Bishops, Batchellors, and
Dynes, were also kinsfolk; and the parties ‘under the great spreading
chestnuts of the old fore court,’ where the young people danced and made
merry to the music of the village band.  Or perhaps, in the depth of
winter, the father would bid young Charles saddle his pony; they would
ride the thirty miles from Northiam to Stowting, with the snow to the
pony’s saddle girths, and be received by the tenants like princes.

This life of delights, with the continual visible comings and goings of
the golden aunt, was well qualified to relax the fibre of the lads.
John, the heir, a yeoman and a fox-hunter, ‘loud and notorious with his
whip and spurs,’ settled down into a kind of Tony Lumpkin, waiting for
the shoes of his father and his aunt.  Thomas Frewen, the youngest, is
briefly dismissed as ‘a handsome beau’; but he had the merit or the good
fortune to become a doctor of medicine, so that when the crash came he
was not empty-handed for the war of life.  Charles, at the day-school of
Northiam, grew so well acquainted with the rod, that his floggings became
matter of pleasantry and reached the ears of Admiral Buckner.  Hereupon
that tall, rough-voiced, formidable uncle entered with the lad into a
covenant: every time that Charles was thrashed he was to pay the Admiral
a penny; everyday that he escaped, the process was to be reversed.  ‘I
recollect,’ writes Charles, ‘going crying to my mother to be taken to the
Admiral to pay my debt.’  It would seem by these terms the speculation
was a losing one; yet it is probable it paid indirectly by bringing the
boy under remark.  The Admiral was no enemy to dunces; he loved courage,
and Charles, while yet little more than a baby, would ride the great
horse into the pond.  Presently it was decided that here was the stuff of
a fine sailor; and at an early period the name of Charles Jenkin was
entered on a ship’s books.

From Northiam he was sent to another school at Boonshill, near Rye, where
the master took ‘infinite delight’ in strapping him.  ‘It keeps me warm
and makes you grow,’ he used to say.  And the stripes were not altogether
wasted, for the dunce, though still very ‘raw,’ made progress with his
studies.  It was known, moreover, that he was going to sea, always a
ground of pre-eminence with schoolboys; and in his case the glory was not
altogether future, it wore a present form when he came driving to Rye
behind four horses in the same carriage with an admiral.  ‘I was not a
little proud, you may believe,’ says he.

In 1814, when he was thirteen years of age, he was carried by his father
to Chichester to the Bishop’s Palace.  The Bishop had heard from his
brother the Admiral that Charles was likely to do well, and had an order
from Lord Melville for the lad’s admission to the Royal Naval College at
Portsmouth.  Both the Bishop and the Admiral patted him on the head and
said, ‘Charles will restore the old family’; by which I gather with some
surprise that, even in these days of open house at Northiam and golden
hope of my aunt’s fortune, the family was supposed to stand in need of
restoration.  But the past is apt to look brighter than nature, above all
to those enamoured of their genealogy; and the ravages of Stephen and
Thomas must have always given matter of alarm.

What with the flattery of bishops and admirals, the fine company in which
he found himself at Portsmouth, his visits home, with their gaiety and
greatness of life, his visits to Mrs. Buckner (soon a widow) at Windsor,
where he had a pony kept for him, and visited at Lord Melville’s and Lord
Harcourt’s and the Leveson-Gowers, he began to have ‘bumptious notions,’
and his head was ‘somewhat turned with fine people’; as to some extent it
remained throughout his innocent and honourable life.

In this frame of mind the boy was appointed to the _Conqueror_, Captain
Davie, humorously known as Gentle Johnnie.  The captain had earned this
name by his style of discipline, which would have figured well in the
pages of Marryat: ‘Put the prisoner’s head in a bag and give him another
dozen!’ survives as a specimen of his commands; and the men were often
punished twice or thrice in a week.  On board the ship of this
disciplinarian, Charles and his father were carried in a billy-boat from
Sheerness in December, 1816: Charles with an outfit suitable to his
pretensions, a twenty-guinea sextant and 120 dollars in silver, which
were ordered into the care of the gunner.  ‘The old clerks and mates,’ he
writes, ‘used to laugh and jeer me for joining the ship in a billy-boat,
and when they found I was from Kent, vowed I was an old Kentish smuggler.
This to my pride, you will believe, was not a little offensive.’

The _Conqueror_ carried the flag of Vice-Admiral Plampin, commanding at
the Cape and St. Helena; and at that all-important islet, in July, 1817,
she relieved the flagship of Sir Pulteney Malcolm.  Thus it befel that
Charles Jenkin, coming too late for the epic of the French wars, played a
small part in the dreary and disgraceful afterpiece of St. Helena.  Life
on the guard-ship was onerous and irksome.  The anchor was never lifted,
sail never made, the great guns were silent; none was allowed on shore
except on duty; all day the movements of the imperial captive were
signalled to and fro; all night the boats rowed guard around the
accessible portions of the coast.  This prolonged stagnation and petty
watchfulness in what Napoleon himself called that ‘unchristian’ climate,
told cruelly on the health of the ship’s company.  In eighteen months,
according to O’Meara, the _Conqueror_ had lost one hundred and ten men
and invalided home one hundred and seven, being more than a third of her
complement.  It does not seem that our young midshipman so much as once
set eyes on Bonaparte; and yet in other ways Jenkin was more fortunate
than some of his comrades.  He drew in water-colour; not so badly as his
father, yet ill enough; and this art was so rare aboard the _Conqueror_
that even his humble proficiency marked him out and procured him some
alleviations.  Admiral Plampin had succeeded Napoleon at the Briars; and
here he had young Jenkin staying with him to make sketches of the
historic house.  One of these is before me as I write, and gives a
strange notion of the arts in our old English Navy.  Yet it was again as
an artist that the lad was taken for a run to Rio, and apparently for a
second outing in a ten-gun brig.  These, and a cruise of six weeks to
windward of the island undertaken by the _Conqueror_ herself in quest of
health, were the only breaks in three years of murderous inaction; and at
the end of that period Jenkin was invalided home, having ‘lost his health
entirely.’

As he left the deck of the guard-ship the historic part of his career
came to an end.  For forty-two years he continued to serve his country
obscurely on the seas, sometimes thanked for inconspicuous and honourable
services, but denied any opportunity of serious distinction.  He was
first two years in the _Larne_, Captain Tait, hunting pirates and keeping
a watch on the Turkish and Greek squadrons in the Archipelago.  Captain
Tait was a favourite with Sir Thomas Maitland, High Commissioner of the
Ionian Islands—King Tom as he was called—who frequently took passage in
the _Larne_.  King Tom knew every inch of the Mediterranean, and was a
terror to the officers of the watch.  He would come on deck at night; and
with his broad Scotch accent, ‘Well, sir,’ he would say, ‘what depth of
water have ye?  Well now, sound; and ye’ll just find so or so many
fathoms,’ as the case might be; and the obnoxious passenger was generally
right.  On one occasion, as the ship was going into Corfu, Sir Thomas
came up the hatchway and cast his eyes towards the gallows.
‘Bangham’—Charles Jenkin heard him say to his aide-de-camp, Lord
Bangham—‘where the devil is that other chap?  I left four fellows hanging
there; now I can only see three.  Mind there is another there to-morrow.’
And sure enough there was another Greek dangling the next day.  ‘Captain
Hamilton, of the _Cambrian_, kept the Greeks in order afloat,’ writes my
author, ‘and King Tom ashore.’

From 1823 onward, the chief scene of Charles Jenkin’s activities was in
the West Indies, where he was engaged off and on till 1844, now as a
subaltern, now in a vessel of his own, hunting out pirates, ‘then very
notorious’ in the Leeward Islands, cruising after slavers, or carrying
dollars and provisions for the Government.  While yet a midshipman, he
accompanied Mr. Cockburn to Caraccas and had a sight of Bolivar.  In the
brigantine _Griffon_, which he commanded in his last years in the West
Indies, he carried aid to Guadeloupe after the earthquake, and twice
earned the thanks of Government: once for an expedition to Nicaragua to
extort, under threat of a blockade, proper apologies and a sum of money
due to certain British merchants; and once during an insurrection in San
Domingo, for the rescue of certain others from a perilous imprisonment
and the recovery of a ‘chest of money’ of which they had been robbed.
Once, on the other hand, he earned his share of public censure.  This was
in 1837, when he commanded the _Romney_ lying in the inner harbour of
Havannah.  The _Romney_ was in no proper sense a man-of-war; she was a
slave-hulk, the bonded warehouse of the Mixed Slave Commission; where
<DW64>s, captured out of slavers under Spanish colours, were detained
provisionally, till the Commission should decide upon their case and
either set them free or bind them to apprenticeship.  To this ship,
already an eye-sore to the authorities, a Cuban slave made his escape.
The position was invid