Читать книгу A First Fleet Family - Becke Louis - Страница 4

Table of Contents

Solcombe

To you, my dear children, who have as yet experienced no privations and know not the true dreadfulness of a life of great hardship, I leave this record of your father’s early career. May it serve to bring to your minds, when those about you too readily judge harshly of their fellow-men, that all, even the humblest and poorest, may, if they steadily do their duty, rise to a comfortable station in life and win the respect of those whose respect is worth the winning.

That you may be able to follow your father’s fortunes from his earliest youth down to that happy time when he was able to return from his foreign adventures and settle, a prosperous man, in his native country, I have added to my diary such particulars as my now failing memory and the recollections of my old comrades supply me with.

In the old family Bible which, as children, has so often afforded you, with its pictures, a pleasant and proper Sunday afternoon’s entertainment, you will find on that leaf where your names are written this entry:—

“William Dew, born February 28, 1764.”

It would be no good for me to pretend to be younger than I am, for, with the excellent schooling you have had, you could very easily cypher out my age. Your grandfather was a good, honest farmer, with a fine turn for smuggling — as who had not in our little village in those days? In truth, as is well known, smuggling was carried on among all conditions of people who lived on the English coast and in the Isle of Wight; not only the fishermen but the small farmers, and even the big squires and landed gentry— some of whom held His Majesty’s Commission of the Peace — had a hand in the contraband trade. Indeed, if all we hear be true, the art of landing a keg of good brandy under the noses of the Preventive Service is not yet lost upon the island.

Let me try and describe Solcombe as it was in those days, and you can see for yourselves if it has as much altered as the men and women are changed who live in it.

Solcombe — where some of you, as well as your father and grandfather, were born — lies at the back of the Wight, which is the side of the island nearest to the French coast, and when I was a boy the farms thereabout ran down almost to the water’s edge — that is to say, to the ledges of the high chalk cliffs which formed a boundary wall and shut out the sea from sight, though in heavy weather its salt spray was flung high upward in drenching showers upon the gardens of the villagers. On a rough winter’s night in the Channel, the roar of the breakers, as they smote the steep-to cliffs in all their unchecked fury, would shake the houses of the village, and strike terror to the hearts of those women in Solcombe — and there were many — who had their men-folk away at sea. Sometimes, especially when the force of the wind had broken a bit, the wild clamour of the beating surf could be heard half-way across to the other side of the island. Beating like this for ages against the cliffs, the sea had hollowed out of them many a dark and winding cavern, some of which ran far back into the very bowels of the land. And on both sides of Solcombe every little inlet and indentation on the coast-line gave a harbour to the smugglers for running their cargoes, and the natural caves provided glorious warehouses for French brandy and bales of fine silk and other gear sought after by grand ladies who cared but little that such things sometimes cost blood and death besides the money paid for them. In these caves the smuggled goods would remain till favourable opportunity came for either selling them on the island or sending them away across the Solent to where they would be quickly disposed of to people who lived by smuggling alone.

Difficult of access by land — save in rare cases — and familiar only to the dwellers in their near vicinity even by sea, these smugglers’ storehouses were seldom discovered by the Preventive Service men; but occasionally an informer would betray the intention of the smugglers to run a cargo, and then, perhaps, a desperate fight would follow, and more than one poor fellow would lose his life doing his duty, and a few prisoners would be manacled and gyved, and marched away and committed to Winchester Gaol.

George the Third was king in those days, and the war with the rebellious American colonists was looming up, though no one, as I have since heard, ever thought it would prove such a great and disastrous conflict as it did.

Father had a great notion of giving me some schooling, for he was something of a scholar himself, having in his young days been taught a good deal above his station; and so I was kept at the village school till I grew to be quite a strapping fellow, and was full sixteen years of age.

The old schoolmaster had at one time been a soldier, and was always telling us boys about the doings at the wars. He had fought with Marlborough in more than one battle, and was very proud of a scar from a bayonet thrust through his leg. Sometimes, at the village inn, where the talk would turn upon the wars that were then going on, he would say to those present that, though it ill-becomed him at his age to boast, yet could he give them ocular demonstration that he had served his country and received honourable wounds; and then, after some little coaxing, he would show the calf of his right leg, and condescend to drink a pint of ale with the company to the toast of “God save His Majesty, and confusion to his enemies.”

Those were stirring times, for old England was fighting the Spaniards and the French and the Dutch, besides having on her hands the rebellion of the American colonies and the riots in London. And so it came about that, seeing my head had got stuffed full of silly notions of soldiering and going abroad to fight the king’s battles, my father took me from school and set me to help on the farm, in the hope that in following the plough I should forget all about the glory of a red coat and white cross-belts and the rattle of the drum. My mother died just about that time. She was always ailing, and I am afraid that anxiety about me hastened her end, for she was terribly cut up at the way I was bitten with the craze for going a-soldiering.

Even now, after such long, long years, I can sometimes see her face, so rough and wrinkled with care, yet so full of tenderness and love, as she clasped my hands in hers, with the death-shadows deepening upon her features, and a strange, yearning look in her fading eyes that brought a quick gush of tears to mine. Her last words to anyone on earth were spoken to me, for after she had, with failing strength, placed her hand upon my father’s head as he knelt beside her, she turned to me and with her last breath murmured, “And God keep you, my son.” Then she gave a long, heavy sigh and closed her eyes for ever.

After the shock of my mother’s death had somewhat worn off, I turned again to my work upon the farm, but the only effect that following the plough had upon my mind was to make me continually ponder upon the subject of my wishes all the more. I was in great doubt as to which of two ways of serving the king and gratifying my inclinations was the shortest road to glory, whether it was better to go to sea and fight the Spaniards and French under such a man as Rodney, and return to my native village with a pocket full of prize money, or to seek honour and fortune with the land forces under our generals in the Americas.