

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