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If the incentive of gain be reckoned stronger than considerations of duty and honor, it was not wanting; for, besides half the value of the vessel, each liberated slave would have been worth twenty-five dollars to the captors a handsome amount of prize-money, in a cargo of six or eight hundred.
One hundred thousand pounds was offered by the army to the Marquess, but honourably declined by him as encroaching on the general prize-money. But the Court of Directors, in recompense, voted him five thousand pounds a-year for twenty years. We now come to another important period in the career of this distinguished servant of the crown.
"With Walsingham it is only a secondary consideration," replied Beaumont; "honour is Captain Walsingham's first object. I dare say he has never yet calculated what his prize-money will be." "Right, right!" reiterated Mr. Palmer; "then he is the right sort. Long may it be before our naval officers think more of prize-money than of glory!
I must say, that this circumstance was always a source of deep regret in the whole fleet, and that his being a Frenchman, instead of an Englishman, increased the feeling of commiseration. We were all delighted when our signal was hoisted to "part company," as we anticipated plenty of prize-money under such an enterprising captain.
Some people declare, and naval men even do so, that there's no romance in a seafaring life that it's all hard, dirty, slaving work, without anything to repay one, except prize-money in war time and promotion in peace.
The character of Captain Horton was well-known to us from the complaints made by the officers belonging to his ship, of his apathy and indolence; indeed, he went by the sobriquet of "the Sloth." It certainly was very annoying to his officers to witness so many opportunities of prize-money and distinction thrown away through the indolence of his disposition.
For we overhauled a suspicious-looking, fast-sailing junk, which paid no heed to our signals, but was brought to after a long chase, and every man on board was chuckling and thinking about prize-money.
Here was I fighting nobly for my king and country, when a Frenchman's shot spoilt both my legs, and I was left to stump off as best I could on these here timber toes without a shiner in my pocket, robbed of all my hard-earned prize-money.
But we consoled ourselves: if we did not make prize-money, at all events, we were very happy, and the major part of the officers very much in love. We had remained in Halifax harbour about three weeks, when a very great change for the worse took place in Captain Kearney's disease. Disease, indeed, it could hardly be called.
My father being a sober, steady man, having saved more of his pay and prize-money than had most of his shipmates, when he left the service bought a wherry, hired and furnished a house, and married my mother, Polly Treherne, the daughter of a bumboat-woman who plied her trade in Portsmouth Harbour.
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