Chapter 4

I was now eased of the greatest apprehension which I had from the length of the passage; and I told the captain I was become indifferent as to the time of his sailing. He expressed much satisfaction in this declaration, and at hearing from me that I found myself, since my tapping, much lighter and better. In this, I believe, he was sincere; for he was, as we shall have occasion to observe more than once, a very good-natured man; and, as he was a very brave one too, I found that the heroic constancy with which I had borne an operation that is attended with scarce any degree of pain had not a little raised me in his esteem. That he might adhere, therefore, in the most religious and rigorous manner to his word, when he had no longer any temptation from interest to break it, as he had no longer any hopes of more goods or passengers, he ordered his ship to fall down to Gravesend on Sunday morning, and there to wait his arrival.

Sunday, June 30.--Nothing worth notice passed till that morning, when my poor wife, after passing a night in the utmost torments of the toothache, resolved to have it drawn. I despatched therefore a servant into Wapping to bring in haste the best tooth-drawer he could find. He soon found out a female of great eminence in the art; but when he brought her to the boat, at the waterside, they were informed that the ship was gone; for indeed she had set out a few minutes after his quitting her; nor did the pilot, who well knew the errand on which I had sent my servant, think fit to wait a moment for his return, or to give me any notice of his setting out, though I had very patiently attended the delays of the captain four days, after many solemn promises of weighing anchor every one of the three last. But of all the petty bashaws or turbulent tyrants I ever beheld, this sour-faced pilot was the worst tempered; for, during the time that he had the guidance of the ship, which was till we arrived in the Downs, he complied with no one's desires, nor did he give a civil word, or indeed a civil look, to any on board.

The tooth-drawer, who, as I said before, was one of great eminence among her neighbors, refused to follow the ship; so that my man made himself the best of his way, and with some difficulty came up with us before we were got under full sail; for after that, as we had both wind and tide with us, he would have found it impossible to overtake the ship till she was come to an anchor at Gravesend.

The morning was fair and bright, and we had a passage thither, I think, as pleasant as can be conceived: for, take it with all its advantages, particularly the number of fine ships you are always sure of seeing by the way, there is nothing to equal it in all the rivers of the world. The yards of Deptford and of Woolwich are noble sights, and give us a just idea of the great perfection to which we are arrived in building those floating castles, and the figure which we may always make in Europe among the other maritime powers. That of Woolwich, at least, very strongly imprinted this idea on my mind; for there was now on the stocks there the Royal Anne, supposed to be the largest ship ever built, and which contains ten carriage-guns more than had ever yet equipped a first-rate.

It is true, perhaps, that there is more of ostentation than of real utility in ships of this vast and unwieldy burden, which are rarely capable of acting against an enemy; but if the building such contributes to preserve, among other nations, the notion of the British superiority in naval affairs, the expense, though very great, is well incurred, and the ostentation is laudable and truly political. Indeed, I should be sorry to allow that Holland, France, or Spain, possessed a vessel larger and more beautiful than the largest and most beautiful of ours; for this honor I would always administer to the pride of our sailors, who should challenge it from all their neighbors with truth and success. And sure I am that not our honest tars alone, but every inhabitant of this island, may exult in the comparison, when he considers the king of Great Britain as a maritime prince, in opposition to any other prince in Europe; but I am not so certain that the same idea of superiority will result from comparing our land forces with those of many other crowned heads. In numbers they all far exceed us, and in the goodness and splendor of their troops many nations, particularly the Germans and French, and perhaps the Dutch, cast us at a distance; for, however we may flatter ourselves with the Edwards and Henrys of former ages, the change of the whole art of war since those days, by which the advantage of personal strength is in a manner entirely lost, hath produced a change in military affairs to the advantage of our enemies. As for our successes in later days, if they were not entirely owing to the superior genius of our general, they were not a little due to the superior force of his money. Indeed, if we should arraign marshal Saxe of ostentation when he showed his army, drawn up, to our captive general, the day after the battle of La Val, we cannot say that the ostentation was entirely vain; since he certainly showed him an army which had not been often equaled, either in the number or goodness of the troops, and which, in those respects, so far exceeded ours, that none can ever cast any reflection on the brave young prince who could not reap the laurels of conquest in that day; but his retreat will be always mentioned as an addition to his glory.

In our marine the case is entirely the reverse, and it must be our own fault if it doth not continue so; for continue so it will as long as the flourishing state of our trade shall support it, and this support it can never want till our legislature shall cease to give sufficient attention to the protection of our trade, and our magistrates want sufficient power, ability, and honesty, to execute the laws; a circumstance not to be apprehended, as it cannot happen till our senates and our benches shall be filled with the blindest ignorance, or with the blackest corruption.

Besides the ships in the docks, we saw many on the water: the yachts are sights of great parade, and the king's body yacht is, I believe, unequaled in any country for convenience as well as magnificence; both which are consulted in building and equipping her with the most exquisite art and workmanship.

We saw likewise several Indiamen just returned from their voyage.

These are, I believe, the largest and finest vessels which are anywhere employed in commercial affairs. The colliers, likewise, which are very numerous, and even assemble in fleets, are ships of great bulk; and if we descend to those used in the American, African, and European trades, and pass through those which visit our own coasts, to the small craft that lie between Chatham and the Tower, the whole forms a most pleasing object to the eye, as well as highly warming to the heart of an Englishman who has any degree of love for his country, or can recognize any effect of the patriot in his constitution. Lastly, the Royal Hospital at Greenwich, which presents so delightful a front to the water, and doth such honor at once to its builder and the nation, to the great skill and ingenuity of the one, and to the no less sensible gratitude of the other, very properly closes the account of this scene; which may well appear romantic to those who have not themselves seen that, in this one instance, truth and reality are capable, perhaps, of exceeding the power of fiction. When we had passed by Greenwich we saw only two or three gentlemen's houses, all of very moderate account, till we reached Gravesend: these are all on the Kentish shore, which affords a much dryer, wholesomer, and pleasanter situation, than doth that of its opposite, Essex. This circumstance, I own, is somewhat surprising to me, when I reflect on the numerous villas that crowd the river from Chelsea upwards as far as Shepperton, where the narrower channel affords not half so noble a prospect, and where the continual succession of the small craft, like the frequent repetition of all things, which have nothing in them great, beautiful, or admirable, tire the eye, and give us distaste and aversion, instead of pleasure. With some of these situations, such as Barnes, Mortlake, etc., even the shore of Essex might contend, not upon very unequal terms; but on the Kentish borders there are many spots to be chosen by the builder which might justly claim the preference over almost the very finest of those in Middlesex and Surrey.

How shall we account for this depravity in taste? for surely there are none so very mean and contemptible as to bring the pleasure of seeing a number of little wherries, gliding along after one another, in competition with what we enjoy in viewing a succession of ships, with all their sails expanded to the winds, bounding over the waves before us.

And here I cannot pass by another observation on the deplorable want of taste in our enjoyments, which we show by almost totally neglecting the pursuit of what seems to me the highest degree of amusement; this is, the sailing ourselves in little vessels of our own, contrived only for our ease and accommodation, to which such situations of our villas as I have recommended would be so convenient, and even necessary.

This amusement, I confess, if enjoyed in any perfection, would be of the expensive kind; but such expense would not exceed the reach of a moderate fortune, and would fall very short of the prices which are daily paid for pleasures of a far inferior rate.

The truth, I believe, is, that sailing in the manner I have just mentioned is a pleasure rather unknown, or unthought of, than rejected by those who have experienced it; unless, perhaps, the apprehension of danger or seasickness may be supposed, by the timorous and delicate, to make too large deductions--insisting that all their enjoyments shall come to them pure and unmixed, and being ever ready to cry out,

----Nocet empta dolore voluptas.

This, however, was my present case; for the ease and lightness which I felt from my tapping, the gayety of the morning, the pleasant sailing with wind and tide, and the many agreeable objects with which I was constantly entertained during the whole way, were all suppressed and overcome by the single consideration of my wife's pain, which continued incessantly to torment her till we came to an anchor, when I dispatched a messenger in great haste for the best reputed operator in Gravesend. A surgeon of some eminence now appeared, who did not decline tooth-drawing, though he certainly would have been offended with the appellation of tooth-drawer no less than his brethren, the members of that venerable body, would be with that of barber, since the late separation between those long-united companies, by which, if the surgeons have gained much, the barbers are supposed to have lost very little. This able and careful person (for so I sincerely believe he is) after examining the guilty tooth, declared that it was such a rotten shell, and so placed at the very remotest end of the upper jaw, where it was in a manner covered and secured by a large fine firm tooth, that he despaired of his power of drawing it.

He said, indeed, more to my wife, and used more rhetoric to dissuade her from having it drawn, than is generally employed to persuade young ladies to prefer a pain of three moments to one of three months' continuance, especially if those young ladies happen to be past forty and fifty years of age, when, by submitting to support a racking torment, the only good circumstance attending which is, it is so short that scarce one in a thousand can cry out "I feel it," they are to do a violence to their charms, and lose one of those beautiful holders with which alone Sir Courtly Nice declares a lady can ever lay hold of his heart. He said at last so much, and seemed to reason so justly, that I came over to his side, and assisted him in prevailing on my wife (for it was no easy matter) to resolve on keeping her tooth a little longer, and to apply palliatives only for relief. These were opium applied to the tooth, and blisters behind the ears.

Whilst we were at dinner this day in the cabin, on a sudden the window on one side was beat into the room with a crash as if a twenty-pounder had been discharged among us. We were all alarmed at the suddenness of the accident, for which, however, we were soon able to account, for the sash, which was shivered all to pieces, was pursued into the middle of the cabin by the bowsprit of a little ship called a cod-smack, the master of which made us amends for running (carelessly at best) against us, and injuring the ship, in the sea-way; that is to say, by damning us all to hell, and uttering several pious wishes that it had done us much more mischief. All which were answered in their own kind and phrase by our men, between whom and the other crew a dialogue of oaths and scurrility was carried on as long as they continued in each other's hearing.

It is difficult, I think, to assign a satisfactory reason why sailors in general should, of all others, think themselves entirely discharged from the common bands of humanity, and should seem to glory in the language and behavior of savages! They see more of the world, and have, most of them, a more erudite education than is the portion of landmen of their degree. Nor do I believe that in any country they visit (Holland itself not excepted) they can ever find a parallel to what daily passes on the river Thames. Is it that they think true courage (for they are the bravest fellows upon earth) inconsistent with all the gentleness of a humane carriage, and that the contempt of civil order springs up in minds but little cultivated, at the same time and from the same principles with the contempt of danger and death? Is it--? in short, it is so; and how it comes to be so I leave to form a question in the Robin Hood Society, or to be propounded for solution among the enigmas in the Woman's Almanac for the next year.

Monday, July 1.--This day Mr. Welch took his leave of me after dinner, as did a young lady of her sister, who was proceeding with my wife to Lisbon. They both set out together in a post-chaise for London. Soon after their departure our cabin, where my wife and I were sitting together, was visited by two ruffians, whose appearance greatly corresponded with that of the sheriffs, or rather the knight-marshal's bailiffs. One of these especially, who seemed to affect a more than ordinary degree of rudeness and insolence, came in without any kind of ceremony, with a broad gold lace on his hat, which was cocked with much military fierceness on his head. An inkhorn at his buttonhole and some papers in his hand sufficiently assured me what he was, and I asked him if he and his companion were not custom-house officers: he answered with sufficient dignity that they were, as an information which he seemed to conclude would strike the hearer with awe, and suppress all further inquiry; but, on the contrary, I proceeded to ask of what rank he was in the custom-house, and, receiving an answer from his companion, as I remember, that the gentleman was a riding surveyor, I replied that he might be a riding surveyor, but could be no gentleman, for that none who had any title to that denomination would break into the presence of a lady without an apology or even moving his hat. He then took his covering from his head and laid it on the table, saying, he asked pardon, and blamed the mate, who should, he said, have informed him if any persons of distinction were below. I told him he might guess by our appearance (which, perhaps, was rather more than could be said with the strictest adherence to truth) that he was before a gentleman and lady, which should teach him to be very civil in his behavior, though we should not happen to be of that number whom the world calls people of fashion and distinction. However, I said, that as he seemed sensible of his error, and had asked pardon, the lady would permit him to put his hat on again if he chose it. This he refused with some degree of surliness, and failed not to convince me that, if I should condescend to become more gentle, he would soon grow more rude. I now renewed a reflection, which I have often seen occasion to make, that there is nothing so incongruous in nature as any kind of power with lowness of mind and of ability, and that there is nothing more deplorable than the want of truth in the whimsical notion of Plato, who tells us that "Saturn, well knowing the state of human affairs, gave us kings and rulers, not of human but divine original; for, as we make not shepherds of sheep, nor oxherds of oxen, nor goatherds of goats, but place some of our own kind over all as being better and fitter to govern them; in the same manner were demons by the divine love set over us as a race of beings of a superior order to men, and who, with great ease to themselves, might regulate our affairs and establish peace, modesty, freedom, and justice, and, totally destroying all sedition, might complete the happiness of the human race. So far, at least, may even now be said with truth, that in all states which are under the government of mere man, without any divine assistance, there is nothing but labor and misery to be found. From what I have said, therefore, we may at least learn, with our utmost endeavors, to imitate the Saturnian institution; borrowing all assistance from our immortal part, while we pay to this the strictest obedience, we should form both our private economy and public policy from its dictates. By this dispensation of our immortal minds we are to establish a law and to call it by that name. But if any government be in the hands of a single person, of the few, or of the many, and such governor or governors shall abandon himself or themselves to the unbridled pursuit of the wildest pleasures or desires, unable to restrain any passion, but possessed with an insatiable bad disease; if such shall attempt to govern, and at the same time to trample on all laws, there can be no means of preservation left for the wretched people." Plato de Leg., lib. iv. p. 713, c. 714, edit. Serrani.

It is true that Plato is here treating of the highest or sovereign power in a state, but it is as true that his observations are general and may be applied to all inferior powers; and, indeed, every subordinate degree is immediately derived from the highest; and, as it is equally protected by the same force and sanctified by the same authority, is alike dangerous to the well-being of the subject. Of all powers, perhaps, there is none so sanctified and protected as this which is under our present consideration. So numerous, indeed, and strong, are the sanctions given to it by many acts of parliament, that, having once established the laws of customs on merchandise, it seems to have been the sole view of the legislature to strengthen the hands and to protect the persons of the officers who became established by those laws, many of whom are so far from bearing any resemblance to the Saturnian institution, and to be chosen from a degree of beings superior to the rest of human race, that they sometimes seem industriously picked out of the lowest and vilest orders of mankind. There is, indeed, nothing, so useful to man in general, nor so beneficial to particular societies and individuals, as trade. This is that alma mater at whose plentiful breast all mankind are nourished. It is true, like other parents, she is not always equally indulgent to all her children, but, though she gives to her favorites a vast proportion of redundancy and superfluity, there are very few whom she refuses to supply with the conveniences, and none with the necessaries, of life.

Such a benefactress as this must naturally be beloved by mankind in general; it would be wonderful, therefore, if her interest was not considered by them, and protected from the fraud and violence of some of her rebellious offspring, who, coveting more than their share or more than she thinks proper to allow them, are daily employed in meditating mischief against her, and in endeavoring to steal from their brethren those shares which this great alma mater had allowed them.

At length our governor came on board, and about six in the evening we weighed anchor, and fell down to the Nore, whither our passage was extremely pleasant, the evening being very delightful, the moon just past the full, and both wind and tide favorable to us.

Tuesday, July 2.--This morning we again set sail, under all the advantages we had enjoyed the evening before. This day we left the shore of Essex and coasted along Kent, passing by the pleasant island of Thanet, which is an island, and that of Sheppy, which is not an island, and about three o 'clock, the wind being now full in our teeth, we came to an anchor in the Downs, within two miles of Deal.--My wife, having suffered intolerable pain from her tooth, again renewed her resolution of having it drawn, and another surgeon was sent for from Deal, but with no better success than the former. He likewise declined the operation, for the same reason which had been assigned by the former: however, such was her resolution, backed with pain, that he was obliged to make the attempt, which concluded more in honor of his judgment than of his operation; for, after having put my poor wife to inexpressible torment, he was obliged to leave her tooth in statu quo; and she had now the comfortable prospect of a long fit of pain, which might have lasted her whole voyage, without any possibility of relief. In these pleasing sensations, of which I had my just share, nature, overcome with fatigue, about eight in the evening resigned her to rest--a circumstance which would have given me some happiness, could I have known how to employ those spirits which were raised by it; but, unfortunately for me, I was left in a disposition of enjoying an agreeable hour without the assistance of a companion, which has always appeared to me necessary to such enjoyment; my daughter and her companion were both retired sea-sick to bed; the other passengers were a rude school-boy of fourteen years old and an illiterate Portuguese friar, who understood no language but his own, in which I had not the least smattering. The captain was the only person left in whose conversation I might indulge myself; but unluckily, besides a total ignorance of everything in the world but a ship, he had the misfortune of being so deaf, that to make him hear, I will not say understand, my words, I must run the risk of conveying them to the ears of my wife, who, though in another room (called, I think, the state-room--being, indeed, a most stately apartment, capable of containing one human body in length, if not very tall, and three bodies in breadth), lay asleep within a yard of me. In this situation necessity and choice were one and the same thing; the captain and I sat down together to a small bowl of punch, over which we both soon fell fast asleep, and so concluded the evening.