What with the flattery of bishops and admirals, the fine company in which he found himself at Portsmouth, his visits home, with their gaiety and greatness of life, his visits to Mrs. Buckner (soon a widow) at Windsor, where he had a pony kept for him, and visited at Lord Melville's and Lord Harcourt's and the Leveson-Gowers, he began to have 'bumptious notions,' and his head was 'somewhat turned with fine people'; as to some extent it remained throughout his innocent and honourable life.
In this frame of mind the boy was appointed to the CONQUEROR, Captain Davie, humorously known as Gentle Johnnie. The captain had earned this name by his style of discipline, which would have figured well in the pages of Marryat: 'Put the prisoner's head in a bag and give him another dozen!' survives as a specimen of his commands; and the men were often punished twice or thrice in a week. On board the ship of this disciplinarian, Charles and his father were carried in a billy-boat from Sheerness in December, 1816: Charles with an outfit suitable to his pretensions, a twenty-guinea ***tant and 120 dollars in silver, which were ordered into the care of the gunner. 'The old clerks and mates,' he writes, 'used to laugh and jeer me for joining the ship in a billy- boat, and when they found I was from Kent, vowed I was an old Kentish smuggler. This to my pride, you will believe, was not a little offensive.'
THE CONQUEROR carried the flag of Vice-Admiral Plampin, commanding at the Cape and St. Helena; and at that all-important islet, in July, 1817, she relieved the flagship of Sir Pulteney Malcolm.
Thus it befel that Charles Jenkin, coming too late for the epic of the French wars, played a small part in the dreary and disgraceful afterpiece of St. Helena. Life on the guard-ship was onerous and irksome. The anchor was never lifted, sail never made, the great guns were silent; none was allowed on shore except on duty; all day the movements of the imperial captive were signalled to and fro; all night the boats rowed guard around the accessible portions of the coast. This prolonged stagnation and petty watchfulness in what Napoleon himself called that 'unchristian' climate, told cruelly on the health of the ship's company. In eighteen months, according to O'Meara, the CONQUEROR had lost one hundred and ten men and invalided home one hundred and seven, being more than a third of her complement. It does not seem that our young midshipman so much as once set eyes on Bonaparte; and yet in other ways Jenkin was more fortunate than some of his comrades. He drew in water-colour; not so badly as his father, yet ill enough; and this art was so rare aboard the CONQUEROR that even his humble proficiency marked him out and procured him some alleviations.
Admiral Plampin had succeeded Napoleon at the Briars; and here he had young Jenkin staying with him to make sketches of the historic house. One of these is before me as I write, and gives a strange notion of the arts in our old English Navy. Yet it was again as an artist that the lad was taken for a run to Rio, and apparently for a second outing in a ten-gun brig. These, and a cruise of six weeks to windward of the island undertaken by the CONQUEROR herself in quest of health, were the only breaks in three years of murderous inaction; and at the end of that period Jenkin was invalided home, having 'lost his health entirely.'
As he left the deck of the guard-ship the historic part of his career came to an end. For forty-two years he continued to serve his country obscurely on the seas, sometimes thanked for inconspicuous and honourable services, but denied any opportunity of serious distinction. He was first two years in the LARNE, Captain Tait, hunting pirates and keeping a watch on the Turkish and Greek squadrons in the Archipelago. Captain Tait was a favourite with Sir Thomas Maitland, High Commissioner of the Ionian Islands - King Tom as he was called - who frequently took passage in the LARNE. King Tom knew every inch of the Mediterranean, and was a terror to the officers of the watch. He would come on deck at night; and with his broad Scotch accent, 'Well, sir,' he would say, 'what depth of water have ye? Well now, sound; and ye'll just find so or so many fathoms,' as the case might be; and the obnoxious passenger was generally right. On one occasion, as the ship was going into Corfu, Sir Thomas came up the hatchway and cast his eyes towards the gallows. 'Bangham' - Charles Jenkin heard him say to his aide-de-camp, Lord Bangham - 'where the devil is that other chap? I left four fellows hanging there; now I can only see three. Mind there is another there to-morrow.' And sure enough there was another Greek dangling the next day. 'Captain Hamilton, of the CAMBRIAN, kept the Greeks in order afloat,' writes my author, 'and King Tom ashore.'