The years of service which thus impressed themselves on Marryat’s memory may be divided into three periods. First, a cruise on the coast of France from Ushant to the mouth of the Gironde; then a longer period of active work in the Mediterranean; and finally, a return to the ocean, and the action in the Basque Roads. The young midshipman’s first actual experience of cruising was one which was doubtless present in his mind when he wrote the song whereof the chorus tells how “Poll put her arms akimbo,” and said, “Port Admiral, you be----.” When the corporal reported to Mr. Vanslyperken that the crew of the revenue cutter were singing this ditty, the outraged commander asked whether it was the Port Admiral at Portsmouth or Plymouth. The officer who was, we may be sure, spoken of by the crew of the _Impérieuse_ on the 17th and succeeding few days of November, 1806, in an equally mutinous fashion, was the Port Admiral at Plymouth. According to the custom of Admirals who did not have to go to sea themselves, this officer was exceeding zealous in enforcing the Admiralty’s orders to despatch ships to sea smartly. The orders came down for the _Impérieuse_ to go to sea, and the Admiral would have them obeyed. Go she must--“The moment the rudder--which was being hung--would steer the ship,” as Dundonald says in his Autobiography, and while she had “a lighter full of provisions on one side, a second with ordnance stores on the other, and a third filled with gunpowder towing astern.” But the tale should be told in Marryat’s words, and not in his captain’s:
“The _Impérieuse_ sailed; the Admiral of the port was one who _would_ be obeyed, but _would not_ listen always to reason or common sense. The signal for sailing was enforced by gun after gun; the anchor was hove up, and, with all her stores on deck, her guns not even mounted, in a state of confusion unparalleled from her being obliged to hoist in faster than it was possible she could stow away, she was driven out of harbour to encounter a heavy gale. A few hours more would have enabled her to proceed to sea with security, but they were denied; the consequences were appalling, they might have been fatal. In the general confusion some iron too near the binnacles had attracted the needle of the compasses; the ship was steered out of her course. At midnight, in a heavy gale at the close of November, so dark that you could not distinguish any object, however close, the _Impérieuse_ dashed upon the rocks between Ushant and the Main. The cry of terror which ran through the lower decks; the grating of the keel as she was forced in; the violence of the shocks which convulsed the frame of the vessel; the hurrying up of the ship’s company without their clothes; and then the enormous waves which again bore her up, and carried her clean over the reef, will never be effaced from my memory.”