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Updated: June 27, 2025
Arrived in the Downs ordered by signal from the guardship to proceed to Portsmouth. Arrived at Spithead ordered to fit to receive a general officer, and six pieces of field artillery, and a Spanish Ecclesiastic, the Canon of . Plenty of great guns, at any rate a regular park of artillery.
"My young friend, the custom house clerk, whose name was Muller, returned every day from his office at six o'clock, when we had supper, and on this occasion I began to tell him of my new ship, and then said casually: "By the way, who is that conceited-looking fellow from the guardship a man with an ugly scar across his forehead?"
By the time that they had sat down to a gloomy breakfast, Bob was in the boat of a Budmouth waterman, who pulled him alongside the guardship in the roads, where he laid hold of the man-rope, mounted, and disappeared from external view.
Lastly, there was the old cruiser Kwei-lin, which had been in the Navy for over twenty years, and which had not moved from her anchorage for the last decade. She was absolutely useless as a fighting machine; and, short as the Chinese were of ships, the futility of taking her to sea was at once recognised, and she was to be left behind to carry on her former duty as guardship to the port.
Catching sight of the pretty little village of Felixstowe the houses facing the sea on the north side and of the neat watering-place of Dovercourt on the left, we stood in between Landguard Fort, on the north shore, and the long breakwater which runs out from the south, when we crossed the mouth of the Orwell at the point where the Stour falls into it, and came to an anchor off Harwich, among a considerable number of vessels, the guardship rising like a giant in their midst.
"You think I am going to swing?" I asked. I didn't want to kill him any more; I wanted too much to hear him talk. I hadn't heard anything for months and months of solitude, of darkness on board the admiral's ship, stranded in the guardship at Plymouth, bumping round the coast, and now here in Newgate. And it had been darkness all the time. Jove!
Pulling steadily away from the old ship on the stream which was running up the harbour, making this appear one vast lake up to Fareham Creek under the base of the Portsdown hills, a lake whereon floated long lines of old hulks of the past, interspersed with many a specimen of the newer models of the present ships of the Navy, the cutter at last landed us at the foot of the King's Stairs; when, unshipping our bags and shouldering them again, we crossed the dockyard in single file, under charge of a petty officer, making for the guardship to which we had been drafted, which was lying alongside the North Wall, not far from the Excellent.
Then, as the boat drew away from the Carlisle pier, as it passed the guardship anchorage and the batteries at the ends of the east and west piers, all those people from whom she had longed to escape seemed to her the most desirable people on earth. Bound for a world unknown, peopled with utter strangers, Ireland, beloved Ireland, called after her as a mother calls to her child.
There it stands, apart from the town, beside the pier, in a climate of its own, half inland, half marine in front, the ferry bubbling with the tide and the guardship swinging to her anchor; behind, the old garden with the trees. Americans seek it already for the sake of Lovel and Oldbuck, who dined there at the beginning of "The Antiquary."
He picked up a handspike and got ready to defend himself; but the seamen made a rush, and a blow with the flat of a heavy cutlass knocked the old sailor senseless. When he came to himself he found that he was on board the guardship. Two days after the Veteran was strolling along the quay in all the glory of white duck and blue pilot cloth.
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