The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 84, October, 1864

The chaster period that our boyhood saw,—
Arts above arms, and without conquest, Law,—
Rights well maintained without the strength of steel
And milder manners for the gentle weal,—
That Freedom's promise may not come to blight,
And Wisdom fail, and Knowledge end in night?

    New Haven, August 8.

PAUL JONES AND DENIS DUVAL

Ingham and his wife have a habit of coming in to spend the evening with us, unless we go there, or unless we both go to Haliburton's, or unless there is something better to do elsewhere.

We talk, or we play besique, or Mrs. Haliburton sings, or we sit on the stoup and hear the crickets sing; but when there is a new Trollope or Thackeray,—alas, there will never be another new Thackeray!—all else has always been set aside till we have read that aloud.

When I began the last sentence of the last Thackeray that ever was written, Ingham jumped out of his seat, and cried,—

"There, I said I remembered this Duval, and you made fun of me. Go on,—and I will tell you all about him, when you have done."

So I read on to the sudden end:—

"We had been sent for in order to protect a fleet of merchantmen that were bound to the Baltic, and were to sail under the convoy of our ship and the Countess of Scarborough, commanded by Captain Piercy. And thus it came about, that, after being twenty-five days in His Majesty's service, I had the fortune to be present at one of the most severe and desperate combats that have been fought in our or in any time.

"I shall not attempt to tell that story of the battle of the 23d of September, which ended in our glorious captain striking his own colors to our superior and irresistible enemy." (This enemy, as Mr. Thackeray has just said, is "Monsieur John Paul Jones, afterwards Knight of His Most Christian Majesty's Order of Merit.") "Sir Richard [Pearson, of the English frigate Serapis] has told the story of his disaster in words nobler than any I could supply, who, though indeed engaged in that fatal action, in which our flag went down before a renegade Briton and his motley crew, saw but a very small portion of the battle which ended so fatally for us. It did not commence till nightfall. How well I remember the sound of the enemy's gun, of which the shot crashed into our side in reply to the challenge of our captain who hailed her! Then came a broadside from us,—the first I had ever heard in battle."[7 - Cornhill Magazine, June, 1864, Vol. IX. p. 654.]

Ingham did not speak for a little while. None of us did. And when we did, it was not to speak of Denis Duval, so much as of the friend we lost, when we lost the monthly letter, or at least, Roundabout Paper, from Mr. Thackeray. How much we had prized him,—how strange it was that there was ever a day when we did not know about him,—how strange it was that anybody should call him cynical, or think men must apologize for him:—of such things and of a thousand more we spoke, before we came back to Denis Duval.

But at last Fausta said,—"What do you mean, Fred, by saying you remember Denis Duval?"

And I,—"Did you meet him at the Battle of Pavia, or in Valerius Flaccus's Games in Numidia?" For we have a habit of calling Ingham "The Wandering Jew."

But he would not be jeered at; he only called us to witness, that, from the first chapter of Denis Duval, he had said the name was familiar,—even to the point of looking it out in the Biographical Dictionary; and now that it appeared Duval fought on board the Serapis, he said it all came back to him. His grandfather, his mother's father, was a "volunteer"-boy, preparing to be midshipman, on the Serapis,—and he knew he had heard him speak of Duval!

Oh, how we all screamed! It was so like Ingham! Haliburton asked him if his grandfather was not best-man when Denis married Agnes. Fausta asked him if he would not continue the novel in the "Cornhill." I said it was well known that the old gentleman advised Montcalm to surrender Quebec, interpreted between Cook and the first Kamehameha, piloted La Pérouse between the Centurion and the Graves in Boston harbor, and called him up with a toast at a school-dinner;—that I did not doubt, therefore, that it was all right,—and that he and Duval had sworn eternal friendship in their boyhood, and now formed one constellation in the southern hemisphere. But after we had all done, Ingham offered to bet Newport for the Six that he would substantiate what he said. This is by far the most tremendous wager in our little company; it is never offered, unless there be certainty to back it; it is, therefore, never accepted; and the nearest approach we have ever made to Newport, as a company, was one afternoon when we went to South-Boston Point in the horse-car, and found the tide down. Silence reigned, therefore, and the subject changed.

The next night we were at Ingham's. He unlocked a ravishing old black mahogany secretary he has, and produced a pile of parchment-covered books of different sizes, which were diaries of old Captain Heddart's. They were often called log-books,—but, though in later years kept on paper ruled for log-books, and often following to a certain extent the indications of the columns, they were almost wholly personal, and sometimes ran a hundred pages without alluding at all to the ship on which he wrote. Well! the earliest of these was by far the most elegant in appearance. My eyes watered a little, as Ingham showed me on the first page, in the stiff Italian hand which our grandmothers wrote in, when they aspired to elegance, the dedication,—

"To my dear Francis,

who will write something here every day, because he loves his Mother."

That old English gentleman, whom I just remember, when Ingham first went to sea, as the model of mild, kind old men, at Ingham's mother's house,—then he went to sea once himself for the first time,—and he had a mother himself,—and as he went off, she gave him the best album-book that Thetford Regis could make,—and wrote this inscription in ink that was not rusty then!

Well, again! in this book, Ingham, who had been reading it all day, had put five or six newspaper-marks.

The first was at this entry,—

"A new boy came into the mess. They said he was a French boy, but the first luff says he is the Capptain's own nef-few."

Two pages on,—

"The French boy fought Wimple and beat him. They fought seeventeen rounds."

Farther yet,—

"Toney is offe on leave. So the French boy was in oure watch. He is not a French boy. His name is Doovarl."

In the midst of a great deal about the mess, and the fellows, and the boys, and the others, and an inexplicable fuss there is about a speculation the mess entered into with some illicit dealer for an additional supply, not of liquor, but of sugar,—which I believe was detected, and which covers pages of badly written and worse spelled manuscript, not another distinct allusion to the French boy,—not near so much as to Toney or Wimple or Scroop, or big Wallis or little Wallis. Ingham had painfully toiled through it all, and I did after him. But in another volume, written years after, at a time when the young officer wrote a much more rapid, though scarcely more legible hand, he found a long account of an examination appointed to pass midshipmen, and, to our great delight, as it began, this exclamation:—

"When the Amphion's boat came up, who should step up but old Den, whom I had not seen since we were in the Rainbow. We were together all day,—and it was very good to see him."

And afterwards, in the detail of the examination, he is spoken of as "Duval." The passage is a little significant.

Young Heddart details all the questions put to him, as thus:—

"'Old Saumarez asked me which was the narrowest part of the Channel, and I told him. Then he asked how Silly [sic] bore, if I had 75 fathom, red sand and gravel. I said, 'About N.W.,' and the old man said, 'Well, yes,—rather West of N.W., is not it so, Sir Richard?' And Sir Richard did not know what they were talking about, and they pulled out Mackenzie's Survey," etc., etc., etc.,—more than any man would delve through at this day, unless he were searching for Paul Jones or Denis Duval, or some other hero. "What is the mark for going into Spithead?" "What is the mark for clearing Royal Sovereign Shoals?"—let us hope they were all well answered. Evidently, in Mr. Heddart's mind, they were more important than any other detail of that day, but fortunately for posterity then comes this passage:—

"After me they called up Brooke, and Calthorp, and Clements,—and then old Wingate, Tom Wingate's father, who had examined them, seemed to get tired, and turned to Pierson, and said, 'Sir Richard, you ought to take your turn." And so Sir Richard began, and, as if by accident, called up Den.

"'Mr. Duval,' said he, 'how do you find the variation of the compass by the amplitudes or azimuths?'

"Of course any fool knew that. And of course he could not ask all such questions. So, when he came on practice, he said,—

"'Mr. Duval, what is the mark for Stephenson's Shoal?'

"Oh, dear! what fun it was to hear Den answer,—Lyd Church and the ruins of Lynn Monastery must come in one. The Shoal was about three miles from Dungeness, and bore S.W. or somewhere from it. The Soundings were red sand—or white sand or something,—very glib. Then—

"'How would you anchor under Dungeness, Mr. Duval?'

"And Duval was not too glib, but very certain. He would bring it to bear S.W. by W., or, perhaps, W.S.W.; he would keep the Hope open of Dover, and he would try to have twelve fathoms water.

"'Well, Mr. Duval, how does Dungeness bear from Beachy Head?'—and so on, and so on.

"And Den was very good and modest, but quite correct all the same, and as true to the point as Cocker and Gunter together. Oh, dear! I hope the post-captains did not know that Sir Richard was Den's uncle, and that Den had sailed in and out of Winchelsea harbour, in sight of Beachy Head and Dungeness, ever since the day after he was born!

"But he made no secret of it when we passed-mids dined at the Anchor.

"A jolley time we had! I slept there."

With these words, Denis Duval vanishes from the Diary.

Of course, as soon as we had begged Ingham's pardon, we turned back to find the battle with the Bon Homme Richard. Little enough was there. The entry reads thus,—this time rather more in log-book shape.

On the left-hand page, in columns elaborately ruled,—

The rest of that page is blank. The right page, headed, "Remarks, &c., on board H.M.S. Serapis," in the boy's best copy-hand, goes on with longer entries than any before.

"42 vessels reported for the convoy. Mr. Mycock says we shall not wait for the rest."

"10 o'clock, A.M. Thursday. Two men came on board with news of the pirate Jones. Signal for a coast-pilot,—weighed and sailed as soon as he came. As we pass Flamboro' Head, two sails in sight S.S.W., which the men say are he and his consort."