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Even an uncommonly warm and industrious imagination could scarcely produce the frail shape of Commodore Nelson leaping from his battered seventy-four-gun Captain through the quarter-gallery window of the eighty-gun San Nicolas, taking her, and hurrying on across her deck to board the towering San Josef of a hundred and twelve guns, so that ‘on the deck of a Spanish first-rate, extravagant as the story may seem, did I receive the swords of the vanquished Spaniards; which, as I received, I gave to William Fearney, one of my bargemen, who put them, with the greatest sang-froid, under his arm’.
‘Or take the Sophie,’ cried the master, anxious to bring his crumb of comfort. ‘She’s rightly a brig, you know, Doctor, with her two masts.’ He held up two fingers, in case a landman might not fully comprehend so great a number.
The Navy speaks in symbols, and you may suit what meaning you choose to the words.’
his streaming yellow hair, which he wore loose and long as a tribute to Lord Nelson, stood straight out behind him at the top of each wave and sank in the troughs between – a natural anemometer
I have never yet known a man admit that he was either rich or asleep: perhaps the poor man and the wakeful man have some great moral advantage.
An ape on a rock no great way off threw a turd at him, quite unprovoked; and when he half rose in protest it shook its wizened
fist and gibbered so furiously that he sank down again, so low were his spirits.
