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Updated: May 24, 2025
The men were leaning on the trawl capstan, while our old landlord, with half-a-dozen pipes within a foot of his face, droned out some long sea-yarn about Ostend, and muds, and snow-storms, and revenue- cruisers going down stern foremost, kegs of brandy and French prisons, which I shall not repeat; for indeed the public has been surfeited with sea-stories of late, from many sufficiently dull ones up to the genial wisdom of 'Peter Simple, and the gorgeous word- painting of 'Tom Cringle's Log. And now the subject is stale the old war and the wonders thereof have died away into the past, like the men who fought in it; and Trafalgar and the Bellerophon are replaced by Manchester and 'Mary Barton. We have solved the old sea-going problems pretty well thanks to wise English-hearted Captain Marryat, now gone to his rest, just when his work was done; and we must turn round and face a few land-going problems not quite so easy of solution.
"I say, Don Ricardibus do beg pardon, though do give over this humbugging outlandish lingo of yours speak like a Christian, in your mother tongue, and leave off your Spanish, which now, since I know it is all a bam, seems to sit as strangely on you as my grandmother's toupe would on Tom Cringle's Mary."
Now, I don't dispute the roaring of sterns in season. But, me, if you or any other man shall make Tom Cringle's stern roar, out of season, on compulsion. I wrote STEM, the cutwater of the ship, the coulter as it were the head of her, not the tail, as the devil would have it.
We had two mates, a surgeon, two midshipmen besides myself, one of whom was making his first voyage, and three apprentices who had never before been to sea, with a crew, including the boatswain, of five-and-twenty hands. I did not find things quite as pleasant as I had expected, from reading "Tom Cringle's Log" and Captain Marryat's novels, and other romantic tales of the sea.
The affair may well take rank with any of the most brilliant boat services on record, and Admiral Rowley expressed in a general order his sense of the admirable skill and courage with which the enterprise had been carried out. That most graphic of writers, Michael Scott, who spent many years in the West Indies, had evidently heard of it when he wrote "Tom Cringle's Log."
The famous ride in 'Geoffrey Hamlyn, where the fate of the heroine, threatened with worse than death from the bush-rangers, hangs upon the horse's speed, seems to us, as we lie abed, one of the finest episodes in fiction. 'Tom Cringle's Log, too, becomes a great favourite, not more from its buoyancy and freshness than from the melodramatic scenes with which it is interspersed.
But of this I am quite sure, that the reading and re-reading of Tom Cringle's Log did more than anything else, in this critical eleventh year of my life, to give fortitude to my individuality, which was in great danger as I now see of succumbing to the pressure my Father brought to bear upon it from all sides.
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