Читать книгу My Adventures During the Late War - Donat Henchy O'Brien - Страница 4

Table of Contents

Donat Henchy O’Brien was born in County Clare during the month of March 1785. Of his odd combination of names, the first was one common in the sept of the O’Briens since the earliest ages: it has nothing to do with St. Donatus, as the casual reader might suppose, but represents the old Erse Donough or Donoght.1 His second name came from his mother, a Miss Henchy, sister of Counsellor Fitz-Gibbon Henchy, a Dublin lawyer of some repute in his day. Of Donat’s father we find nothing more in O’Byrne’s Naval Biography than the characteristically Hibernian statement that “he was descended from one of the ancient monarchs of Ireland.”

Donat O’Brien entered the navy on 16th December 1796, when only eleven, starting even younger than the average of the midshipmen of those hard days. Apparently he owed his introduction to the service to Captain (afterwards Rear-Admiral) Edward Walpole Brown, whom he styles “his early patron.” His first vessel was the Overyssel (64), a Dutch line-of-battle ship which had been seized in Cork Harbour in 1795, where it was lying when Holland was forced to yield to France and to become her subservient ally. In this vessel he served for three years, under Captains Young and Bazely, mainly in the North Sea squadron. He was present in her at the surrender of the Dutch fleet in the Texel on 30th August 1799, during the futile campaign of the Duke of York. Later in the same year the Overyssel was engaged in the blockading of three Dutch men-of-war which had run into the port of Goeree. While in charge of an old merchant ship, which was to be sunk at the mouth of the harbour, for the more effectual shutting in of the fugitives, O’Brien was in great peril. The vessel was overset in a sudden gale, and he had a narrow escape from drowning, being saved at the last moment by a boat of the Lion cutter.

From the Overyssel O’Brien passed in December 1801 to the Beschermer (54), another Dutch prize,2 commanded by Captain Alexander Frazer. He was in her but a few months, as she was laid up in Ordinary at Chatham when the long negotiations for an accommodation with France were seen to be coming to a successful conclusion. In the spring of 1802, when the Peace of Amiens had been signed, O’Brien sailed in the Amphion, a 32-gun frigate, where he again had Captain Frazer as his chief. During the short suspension of hostilities the frigate was first cruising in British waters to suppress smuggling, and then engaged in a short cruise to Lisbon.

In January 1803 O’Brien completed his six years of service as a midshipman, and went up to London to pass his lieutenant’s examination. This being accomplished with success, he returned for a short time to the Amphion, but was in a few months moved, as a master’s mate, to the Hussar, a new 38-gun frigate commanded by Captain Philip Wilkinson.

The name Hussar was unlucky: the last ship that had borne the name, a 28-gun frigate, had been lost by shipwreck off the French coast on 27th December 1796, the greater part of her crew being made prisoners. Her successor was to have precisely the same fate less than a year after she had been put into commission. She sailed from Spithead in May 1803, immediately after the rupture of the Peace of Amiens, and was cruising in the North Atlantic and in the Bay of Biscay during the first months of the war. During the winter the Hussar was ordered to join Sir Edward Pellew’s squadron off the coast of Spain, and was lying with him in Ares Bay, near Ferrol, when she was ordered home with despatches. Captain Wilkinson was told to communicate on the way with the Channel Fleet, which was lying off Cape Finisterre, under Admiral Cornwallis, engaged in the blockade of Brest. It was this diversion into French waters which caused the loss of the Hussar. On 8th February 1804 she ran ashore on the Saintes rocks, and became a total wreck. The majority of the crew struggled ashore and fell into the hands of the French.

Here Donat O’Brien’s own narrative begins. He may be left to tell the tale of his own misfortunes and adventures from February 1804 till October 1813. Suffice it to say that he was a prisoner at Givet from 28th March till 16th July 1804. He was then transferred to Verdun, where he lay interned till the August of 1807, when he made his first dash for liberty in company with three other naval officers—Lieutenant Essel and two midshipmen named Ashworth and Tuthill. After making their way through countless dangers as far as Étaples on the coast of Picardy, they were seized by douaniers when actually in sight of the sea and the English cruisers in the Channel. Their status being soon discovered, they were sent back to prison, after an Odyssey which had lasted from the 28th of August to the 18th of September 1807.

After recapture O’Brien and his companions were told off for confinement in the mountain-fort of Bitche, a bleak fastness in the Vosges, appropriated to refractory or undesirable prisoners of war. While on their journey thither, escorted by mounted gendarmes, the prisoners had a chance of escape—they made a sudden dash for a neighbouring wood and ran for their lives. In their flight they soon lost sight of each other, and, while the others were recaptured, O’Brien got away. He made for the nearest neutral frontier, that of Austria, and nearly reached his goal. After passing the Rhine, crossing the Black Forest, and working far into Bavaria, he was arrested on suspicion at Lindau on the Lake of Constance. It was soon discovered that he was an escaped English prisoner, and the Bavarian Government sent him back under escort to France. His second futile attempt to escape had covered the period from 15th November to 30th November 1807.

His two desperate dashes for freedom secured O’Brien a place in the most miserable subterranean casemate of Bitche. Nevertheless, after a year’s captivity this undaunted master’s mate once more escaped—this time in company with a midshipman named Hewson, a dragoon officer named Batley, and a surgeon named Barklimore. Having constructed a rope, they let themselves down from the three concentric walls of Bitche, a height of 200 feet in all, and got clear away.

This time fortune was with O’Brien. He and two of his companions (the third, Captain Batley, fell ill at Rastadt and had to be left behind) crossed South Germany in safety, and reached the Austrian frontier not many miles from Salzburg. The local officials politely acquiesced in a transparent fiction by which the fugitives pretended to be Americans, and allowed them to proceed to Trieste, where they were picked up by a boat of the Amphion, one of O’Brien’s old ships. The third voyage of this much-travelled man had lasted from 15th September to 7th November 1808.

We need not linger over his service in the Mediterranean on the Amphion, Warrior, and Bacchante. Suffice it to say that he became a lieutenant on 29th March 1809, and was promoted to the rank of commander on 22nd January 1813. He had seen much service during these four years, and had once been severely wounded in an unsuccessful attempt to board and capture a Venetian trabaccolo off Trieste. The most important action in which he was engaged was Commodore Hoste’s victory off Lissa on 13th March 1811.

On being promoted to the rank of commander, O’Brien had to return to England, no ship being available for him in the Mediterranean. He arrived at Portsmouth on 4th October 1813, and took for some months a well-earned holiday. He was in hopes of seeing service against the Americans, but the times were unpropitious. Both the Napoleonic and the American wars were coming to an end, and, like so many other energetic naval and military men, O’Brien found himself placed on half-pay in 1814.

He only had one more turn of service afloat, in command of the Slaney, a 20-gun sloop, which cruised on the South American station from 1818 to 1821. The rest of his life—he was still only thirty-six years of age—was spent in enforced retirement: in the thirties and forties the navy was kept low, and there was little prospect of work for the half-pay captain.

On 28th June 1825 O’Brien married Hannah, youngest daughter of John Walmsley of Castle Mere, Lancashire, by whom he became the father of a large family, seven children in all. Two years after, he took his wife for a long tour round northern France, to show her the places of his imprisonments and escapes. It was this revisiting of old scenes that caused him to write the book which we have here reprinted. But he did not publish it till 1839, when it appeared, dedicated by permission to the young Queen Victoria. He had, however, already put out long before a shorter narrative of his escape, from which the two-volume book of 1839 was expanded. It had appeared in the Naval Chronicle for the years 1812-15, in the strange form of sixteen “Naval Bulletins” addressed to no less a person than the Emperor Napoleon. The dedication of this original draft deserves reproduction—it runs as follows:—

“As your Imperial Majesty has long delighted in the compilation of endless Bulletins, as they are styled, in which truth and candour are never suffered to appear, it may perhaps amuse you, during some of these pauses which occasionally occur in your systematic destruction and humiliation of your fellow-creatures, to be enabled to hear a little truth, and to trace the manner in which such a humble individual as myself bade defiance to your persecutions, and has at length returned to his duty as a naval officer, notwithstanding all the dungeons, fetters, and insults which distinguished your reign of despotism.”

The last of the “Naval Bulletins” appeared in the same number of the Naval Chronicle as a narrative by Henry Ashworth, one of the companions of O’Brien’s first escape. From this, an incomplete story, which Ashworth did not survive to finish, certain parts of O’Brien’s tale can be corroborated and expanded.

O’Brien was promoted to the rank of rear-admiral on 8th March 1852. He survived five years more, and died on 13th May 1857 at Yew House, Hoddesdon, in his seventy-third year.

The not very flattering portrait of him which we have reproduced as our frontispiece was drawn by J. Pelham and engraved by J. Brown for the book of 1839.