The treatment a volunteer of Trelawny’s age could expect in the Royal Navy during the time of the Napoleonic Wars would have varied with the personality of the ship’s captain, but even under the most enlightened and humane regime the life in the midshipman’s cockpit of a man-of-war was harsh and brutalizing. In the light of his fixed hatred of the service in later life, however, it is interesting that Trelawny’s first feelings for his new profession were ones of delight, and he soon had an unforgettable glimpse of the excitement and prize-money which made the wartime navy such a dangerous but attractive option to indigent younger sons. After a few days at sea, his ship crossed with the Pickle on its way back from Trafalgar, bringing to the stunned crew of the Superb the news of Nelson’s victory and death. The next morning they fell in with a part of the triumphant fleet, and Trelawny was transferred first to the Temeraire and then across to the stricken Colossus for its journey back to Portsmouth.
We had had a rough passage, being five or six sail of the line in company, some totally, and others partially dismasted. Our ship, having been not only dismasted, but razed by the enemy’s shots (that is, the upper deck almost cut away), our passage home was boisterous. The gallant ship, whose lofty canvases, a few days before, had fluttered almost amidst the clouds, as she bore down on the combined fleets … was crippled, jury-mast, and shattered, a wreck labouring in the trough of the sea, and driven about at the mercy of the wild waves and wind. With infinite toil and peril, amidst the shouts and reverberated hurrahs from successive ships, we passed on, towed into safe moorings at Spithead.
What a scene of joy then took place. From the ship to the shore one might have walked on a bridge of boats, struggling to get alongside. Some, breathless with anxiety, eagerly demanded the fate of brothers, sons, or fathers, which was followed by joyous clasping and wringing of hands, and some returned to the shore, pale, haggard, and heart-stricken. Then came the extortionary Jew, chuckling with ecstacy at the usury he was about to realise from anticipated prize-money, proffering his gold with a niggard’s hand, and demanding monstrous security and interest for his monies. Huge bomboats, filled with fresh provisions, and a circle of boats hung around us, crammed with sailors’ wives, children, doxies, thick as locusts. These last poured in so fast, that of the eight thousand said to belong at that period to Portsmouth and Gosport, I hardly think they could have left eight on shore. In a short period they seemed to have achieved what the combined enemies’ fleets had vauntingly threatened – to have taken entire possession of the Trafalgar squadron. I remember, the following day, while the ship was dismantling, these scarlet sinners hove out the first thirty-two pound guns; I think there were not less than three or four hundred of them heaving at the capstan.10
This passage is memorable enough for that exuberance and energy that made him one of the finest storytellers of the century, yet its real interest lies in the light it throws on an event which must in some way have shaped Trelawny’s whole personality and sense of self. Here was an occasion where Trelawny was in a sense there but not really a part, a figure hovering somewhere between participant and spectator at one of the great events of history, an innocently fraudulent beneficiary of the acclaim and excitement which greeted the shattered but victorious Colossus on its return to England.
For the rest of his days Trelawny would bitterly regret that he had missed the greatest battle ever fought under sail and the hurrahs of the ships’ crews anchored at Spithead lodged deep in his soul. Throughout the whole of his life the instinctive movement of Trelawny’s memory would always take him to the centre of great events, cavalierly annexing whole scenes and achievements as if they had been his own, and it was possibly here at Portsmouth, as a romantic and impressionable thirteen-year-old blending invisibly with the men who had won Trafalgar, that he had his first heady taste of that surrogate fame that would be the life blood of his adult existence.
If that is the case, his next years in the navy, from 1806 to 1812, must have been ones of bitter disappointment. By the time that Trelawny emerged from obscurity onto a public stage he had sunk their memory beneath the piratical fantasies that fill Adventures, but in the muster books and logs of Admiralty records his life as a volunteer and then midshipman stretches out from ship to ship in a sobering and unbroken line which leaves no room for romance, ambiguity or fulfilment.*
There is no historical document at once so dry and compelling as a ship’s log, nothing that better evokes the routine, discipline and anonymity Trelawny came to hate, but there was another reason, too, for his growing resentment that no mere record could show. ‘Who can paint in words what I felt?’ he asked of his readers later,
Imagine me torn from my native country, destined to cross the wide ocean, to a wild region, cut off from every tie, or possibility of communication, transported like a felon as it were, for life, for, at that period, few ships returned under seven or more years. I was torn away, not seeing my mother, or brother, or sisters, or one familiar face; no voice to speak a word of comfort, or to inspire me with the smallest hope that any thing human took an interest in me … From that period, my affections, imperceptibly, were alienated from my family and kindred, and sought the love of strangers in the wide world …
I could no longer conceal from myself the painful conviction that I was an utter outcast; that my parent had thrust me from his threshold, in the hope that I should not again cross it. My mother’s intercessions (if indeed she made any) were unavailing: I was left to shift for myself. The only indication of my father’s considering he had still a duty to perform towards me, was in an annual allowance, to which either his conscience or his pride impelled him. Perhaps, having done this, he said, with other good and prudent men, – ‘I have provided for my son. If he distinguishes himself, and returns, as a man, high in rank and honour, I can say, – he is my son, and I made him what he is! His daring and fearless character may succeed in the navy.’ He left me to my fate, with as little remorse as he would have ordered a litter of blind puppies to be drowned.11
All the evidence suggests, in fact, that his father exerted whatever influence he had in his son’s favour. Trelawny’s career, however, was proof against help. The account he gave of this time in his Adventures is clearly heightened for effect, but his tales of brawls and endless hours of punishment at the masthead are endorsed by his long list of ships as one captain after another rid himself of a recalcitrant midshipman.
From the Colossus to the Puissant, from the Puissant to the Woolwich and on to the Resistance, the Royal William, the Cornelia and the Hecate; the list stretches out, each change marking another step in Trelawny’s disillusionment, another loosening of ties, a fresh confirmation as the surly boy grew into embittered manhood that there was nowhere he belonged.
After his sudden and dramatic baptism of 1805, there was also little action to alleviate the boredom of naval life. In the period immediately after Trafalgar he had gone on two long voyages to the east and South America, but it was not until 1810 – five years and ten ships after going to sea on the Superb – that the amphibious assault on the French-held island of Mauritius gave him his first hope of the excitement he craved.
As it turned out, the defendants offered virtually no resistance to the massive force which had been assembled, but the attack on Java in the following year – one of the forgotten classics of British arms – at last brought the nineteen-year-old midshipman into a war that, with only a brief respite, had been going on since the execution of Louis XVI just two months after Trelawny’s birth.
The fleets carrying the combined army of native and European troops had sailed from Madras and Calcutta, with the Commander in Chief, General Auchmuty, and the Governor-General, Lord Minto, aboard the HMS Akbar on which Trelawny served. After a fraught passage south the invasion force was landed on 4 August 1811 at Chilingching, and marching eastwards through a heavily cultivated landscape of ditches, water tanks and dykes which reminded Minto of a Chinese wallpaper, entered Batavia only to find its defendants withdrawn behind the strongly fortified Lines of Cornelis some six miles to the north.
On 26 August, under the brilliant leadership of Colonel Rollo Gillespie, and supported by naval