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 sextant 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