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Updated: May 27, 2025
"Well, Mr Tompion," said I, as the man approached, "how are matters looking here on deck?" "All quiet, sir," was the reply, "leastways as far as one can be sartain on sich a pitch-dark night as this.
"Well, Duff, I should like to act as Mr Linton would have done, and I'm sure he would have attacked the mistico without giving two thoughts about it," observed Tompion; "but then, again, for his sake, we ought to get back to the ship as fast as we can, to obtain surgical assistance for him."
You see, therefore, he was no ordinary uneducated clockmaker. What wonder that he and George Graham, one of the illustrious pupils he trained, should have been buried together at Westminster Abbey!" "You haven't told me anything about Graham." "He was a nephew of Tompion and a very clever craftsman whose clocks did honor to his teacher.
He had always been an ingenious fellow interested in evolving mathematical instruments of all sorts." "Were his clocks as good as Tompion's?" queried Christopher. "As to that, the two were pretty well matched," was the answer. "Graham, however, concentrated most of his skill on watches while Tompion put the major part of his talent into long-case clocks which were unrivaled.
After spending the first thirteen years of his life in a village in the North of England, he made his way to London, an intelligent and well-bred Quaker boy; and there he was so fortunate as to be taken as an apprentice by Tompion, then the most celebrated clock-maker in England, whose name is still to be seen upon ancient watches and clocks.
"Capital!" exclaimed Tompion, who was, for a wonder, not above taking advice from a junior, when it happened to be good, and coincided with his own opinion. "What say you, my lads do you think you've got strength enough in your arms to punish some of those rascals for Mr Linton's too like death, and the trick they played us?" "All right, sir, never fear.
"I fully thought we should capture the mistico, and I could not tell but what some of our friends had been taken on board her." "No, Mr Tompion, I have no reason to find fault with your behaviour. As far as I can judge, you showed judgment and gallantry, which, in an officer, it is all important should always be combined.
Fortunately, no further casualties occurred, and every instant, as their distance from the shore increased, there was less chance of a shot hitting them. At length, Tompion, seeing that they were free from danger, hailed the other boats, to order the crews to rest on their oars to recover breath, before they shaped their course to return to their ship.
In the wildest of the wild pell-mell, as the Victory lay like a pelted log, rolling to the storm of shot, with three ships at close quarters hurling all their metal at her, and a fourth alongside clutched so close that muzzle was tompion for muzzle, while the cannon-balls so thickly flew that many sailors with good eyes saw them meet in the air and shatter one another, an order was issued for the starboard guns on the upper deck to cease firing.
So widely was his ability recognized that he was made leading watchmaker to the court of Charles II. Now, although timekeepers had vastly improved, they were still pretty faulty, experimental contrivances, whose outside trappings counted with the public far more than did their interior mechanism. Tompion changed all this.
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