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"Why, admiral," he said, "the very children at home would laugh at us, if, for a second time, we sailed here with an army, and then sailed away again without landing a man." "So they would, Fergusson, so they would," the admiral said. "If I have to stop here till winter, I won't go till I have carried out my orders, and put the troops ashore."
On the rising ground behind the courtyard of the Dîwan-i-âm there formerly existed a palace called the Salîmgarh. Before Jahangir's accession he was known as Prince Salîm, and tradition associates this palace with him. Fergusson, however, states that in his time an exquisite fragment of a palace built by Shere Shah, or his son Salîm, existed here.
At midday on the 24th the gunboats Melik and Dal arrived from Omdurman with a detachment of 200 more men of the Xth Soudanese under Major Fergusson, and thirty men of the IXth Soudanese under Captain Sir Henry Hill. With this addition the force at Colonel Lewis's disposal consisted of half the Xth Soudanese, a small detachment of the IXth Soudanese, two Maxim guns, and a doctor.
In the Philosophical Transactions there is a report of a man who was wounded in the spleen by a large hunting-knife. Fergusson found the spleen hanging from the wound and ligated it. It separated in ten days and the patient recovered. Williams reports a stab-wound of the spleen in a negro of twenty-one.
We know that he made a special pilgrimage to the grave of Fergusson, and that in a letter, dated February 6, 1787, he applied to the honourable bailies of Canongate, Edinburgh, for permission 'to lay a simple stone over his revered ashes'; which petition was duly considered and graciously granted. The stone was afterwards erected, with the simple inscription, 'Here lies Robert Fergusson, Poet.
Much to the captain's satisfaction, though, the grunting inhabitants of the long-boat were found to be all right, escaping as harmlessly as Joe Fergusson; and so, with his mind relieved Old Jock went below soon after "six bells," or two o'clock, leaving the charge of the deck to Mr Saunders who, grumbling at the captain's rather insidious usurpation of his authority, had betaken himself to the lee-side of the taffrail, whence he watched the ship's wake and the foaming rollers that came tumbling after her, as she drove on before the stiff nor'-wester under reefed topsails and courses, the waves trying to poop her every instant, though foiled by her speed.
'The joyous crew of thunderers in the galleries, as Robert Fergusson describes them, the vulgar cits applying to their parched lips 'thirst quenching porter, and the notoriously irregular lives of the players, all these were ties and associations ill calculated to appease the just indignation of his father or to add to forensic reputation in Edinburgh.
He turned round and found Fergusson presenting him to a royal personage, who was graciously pleased, however, to remember a former meeting, and waved away the words of introduction. It chanced, without any design on his part, that Berenice and he left almost at the same time, and met near the stage door.
Fergusson says of one of these, which was in course of construction when he was there in 1839, that he acquired from its native architect more knowledge of the secrets of art as practised in the Middle Ages than he had learnt from all the books he had read. The same living architectural art is practised all over Rajputana at the present day.
Horner; one military officer, General Fergusson; and one naval officer, Admiral Markham. I have been thus particular in describing this transaction, because many of my young readers must have but a very faint recollection of the circumstance; a circumstance that created full as powerful a sensation in the country, at that day, in 1809, as did the persecutions of Queen Caroline, in 1820.
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