Memoir of Fleeming Jenkin(回忆弗莱明·杰肯)

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Memoir of Fleeming Jenkin

Memoir of Fleeming

Jenkin

by Robert Louis Stevenson

Memoir of Fleeming Jenkin

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

Memoir of Fleeming Jenkin

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

Memoir of Fleeming Jenkin

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

Memoir of Fleeming Jenkin

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

PROTHEE, 64, that the lad made his only campaign. It was in the days

of Rodney's war, when the PROTHEE, 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 PROTHEE, 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

Memoir of Fleeming Jenkin

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 60,000L., 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

Memoir of Fleeming Jenkin

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

Memoir of Fleeming Jenkin

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

Memoir of Fleeming Jenkin

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

Memoir of Fleeming Jenkin

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

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MemoirofFleemingJenkin1MemoirofFleemingJenkinbyRobertLouisStevensonMemoirofFleemingJenkin2I.TheJenkinsofStowting-Fleeming'sgrandfather-Mrs.Buckner'sfortune-Fleeming'sfather;goestosea;atSt.Helena;meetsKingTom;serviceintheWestIndies;endofhiscareer-TheCampbell-Jacksons-Fleeming'smother-Fleeming'suncleJ...

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