Memoir of Fleeming Jenkin by Robert Louis Stevenson
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Memoir of Fleeming Jenkin




PREFACE TO THE AMERICAN EDITION.



ON the death of Fleeming Jenkin, his family and friends determined 
to publish a selection of his various papers; by way of 
introduction, the following pages were drawn up; and the whole, 
forming two considerable volumes, has been issued in England.  In 
the States, it has not been thought advisable to reproduce the 
whole; and the memoir appearing alone, shorn of that other matter 
which was at once its occasion and its justification, so large an 
account of a man so little known may seem to a stranger out of all 
proportion.  But Jenkin was a man much more remarkable than the 
mere bulk or merit of his work approves him.  It was in the world, 
in the commerce of friendship, by his brave attitude towards life, 
by his high moral value and unwearied intellectual effort, that he 
struck the minds of his contemporaries.  His was an individual 
figure, such as authors delight to draw, and all men to read of, in 
the pages of a novel.  His was a face worth painting for its own 
sake.  If the sitter shall not seem to have justified the portrait, 
if Jenkin, after his death, shall not continue to make new friends, 
the fault will be altogether mine.

R. L S.

SARANAC, OCT., 1887.



CHAPTER I.



The Jenkins of Stowting - Fleeming's grandfather - Mrs. Buckner's 
fortune - Fleeming's father; goes to sea; at St. Helena; meets King 
Tom; service in the West Indies; end of his career - The Campbell-
Jacksons - Fleeming's mother - Fleeming's uncle John.


IN the reign of Henry VIII., a family of the name of Jenkin, 
claiming to come from York, and bearing the arms of Jenkin ap 
Philip of St. Melans, are found reputably settled in the county of 
Kent.  Persons of strong genealogical pinion pass from William 
Jenkin, Mayor of Folkestone in 1555, to his contemporary 'John 
Jenkin, of the Citie of York, Receiver General of the County,' and 
thence, by way of Jenkin ap Philip, to the proper summit of any 
Cambrian pedigree - a prince; 'Guaith Voeth, Lord of Cardigan,' the 
name and style of him.  It may suffice, however, for the present, 
that these Kentish Jenkins must have undoubtedly derived from 
Wales, and being a stock of some efficiency, they struck root and 
grew to wealth and consequence in their new home.

Of their consequence we have proof enough in the fact that not only 
was William Jenkin (as already mentioned) Mayor of Folkestone in 
1555, but no less than twenty-three times in the succeeding century 
and a half, a Jenkin (William, Thomas, Henry, or Robert) sat in the 
same place of humble honour.  Of their wealth we know that in the 
reign of Charles I., Thomas Jenkin of Eythorne was more than once 
in the market buying land, and notably, in 1633, acquired the manor 
of Stowting Court.  This was an estate of some 320 acres, six miles 
from Hythe, in the Bailiwick and Hundred of Stowting, and the Lathe 
of Shipway, held of the Crown IN CAPITE by the service of six men 
and a constable to defend the passage of the sea at Sandgate.  It 
had a chequered history before it fell into the hands of Thomas of 
Eythorne, having been sold and given from one to another - to the 
Archbishop, to Heringods, to the Burghershes, to Pavelys, Trivets, 
Cliffords, Wenlocks, Beauchamps, Nevilles, Kempes, and Clarkes:  a 
piece of Kentish ground condemned to see new faces and to be no 
man's home.  But from 1633 onward it became the anchor of the 
Jenkin family in Kent; and though passed on from brother to 
brother, held in shares between uncle and nephew, burthened by 
debts and jointures, and at least once sold and bought in again, it 
remains to this day in the hands of the direct line.  It is not my 
design, nor have I the necessary knowledge, to give a history of 
this obscure family.  But this is an age when genealogy has taken a 
new lease of life, and become for the first time a human science; 
so that we no longer study it in quest of the Guaith Voeths, but to 
trace out some of the secrets of descent and destiny; and as we 
study, we think less of Sir Bernard Burke and more of Mr. Galton.  
Not only do our character and talents lie upon the anvil and 
receive their temper during generations; but the very plot of our 
life's story unfolds itself on a scale of centuries, and the 
biography of the man is only an episode in the epic of the family.  
From this point of view I ask the reader's leave to begin this 
notice of a remarkable man who was my friend, with the accession of 
his great-grandfather, John Jenkin.

This John Jenkin, a grandson of Damaris Kingsley, of the family of 
'Westward Ho!' was born in 1727, and married Elizabeth, daughter of 
Thomas Frewen, of Church House, Northiam.  The Jenkins had now been 
long enough intermarrying with their Kentish neighbours to be 
Kentish folk themselves in all but name; and with the Frewens in 
particular their connection is singularly involved.  John and his 
wife were each descended in the third degree from another Thomas 
Frewen, Vicar of Northiam, and brother to Accepted Frewen, 
Archbishop of York.  John's mother had married a Frewen for a 
second husband.  And the last complication was to be added by the 
Bishop of Chichester's brother, Charles Buckner, Vice-Admiral of 
the White, who was twice married, first to a paternal cousin of 
Squire John, and second to Anne, only sister of the Squire's wife, 
and already the widow of another Frewen.  The reader must bear Mrs. 
Buckner in mind; it was by means of that lady that Fleeming Jenkin 
began life as a poor man.  Meanwhile, the relationship of any 
Frewen to any Jenkin at the end of these evolutions presents a 
problem almost insoluble; and we need not wonder if Mrs. John, thus 
exercised in her immediate circle, was in her old age 'a great 
genealogist of all Sussex families, and much consulted.'  The names 
Frewen and Jenkin may almost seem to have been interchangeable at 
will; and yet Fate proceeds with such particularity that it was 
perhaps on the point of name that the family was ruined.

The John Jenkins had a family of one daughter and five extravagant 
and unpractical sons.  The eldest, Stephen, entered the Church and 
held the living of Salehurst, where he offered, we may hope, an 
extreme example of the clergy of the age.  He was a handsome figure 
of a man; jovial and jocular; fond of his garden, which produced 
under his care the finest fruits of the neighbourhood; and like all 
the family, very choice in horses.  He drove tandem; like Jehu, 
furiously.  His saddle horse, Captain (for the names of horses are 
piously preserved in the family chronicle which I follow), was 
trained to break into a gallop as soon as the vicar's foot was 
thrown across its back; nor would the rein be drawn in the nine 
miles between Northiam and the Vicarage door.  Debt was the man's 
proper element; he used to skulk from arrest in the chancel of his 
church; and the speed of Captain may have come sometimes handy.  At 
an early age this unconventional parson married his cook, and by 
her he had two daughters and one son.  One of the daughters died 
unmarried; the other imitated her father, and married 
'imprudently.'  The son, still more gallantly continuing the 
tradition, entered the army, loaded himself with debt, was forced 
to sell out, took refuge in the Marines, and was lost on the Dogger 
Bank in the war-ship MINOTAUR.  If he did not marry below him, like 
his father, his sister, and a certain great-uncle William, it was 
perhaps because he never married at all.

The second brother, Thomas, who was employed in the General Post-
Office, followed in all material points the example of Stephen, 
married 'not very creditably,' and spent all the money he could lay 
his hands on.  He died without issue; as did the fourth brother, 
John, who was of weak intellect and feeble health, and the fifth 
brother, William, whose brief career as one of Mrs. Buckner's 
satellites will fall to be considered later on.  So soon, then, as 
the MINOTAUR had struck upon the Dogger Bank, Stowting and the line 
of the Jenkin family fell on the shoulders of the third brother, 
Charles.

Facility and self-indulgence are the family marks; facility (to 
judge by these imprudent marriages) being at once their quality and 
their defect; but in the case of Charles, a man of exceptional 
beauty and sweetness both of face and disposition, the family fault 
had quite grown to be a virtue, and we find him in consequence the 
drudge and milk-cow of his relatives.  Born in 1766, Charles served 
at sea in his youth, and smelt both salt water and powder.  The 
Jenkins had inclined hitherto, as far as I can make out, to the 
land service.  Stephen's son had been a soldier; William (fourth of 
Stowting) had been an officer of the unhappy Braddock's in America, 
where, by the way, he owned and afterwards sold an estate on the 
James River, called, after the parental seat; of which I should 
like well to hear if it still bears the name.  It was probably by 
the influence of Captain Buckner, already connected with the family 
by his first marriage, that Charles Jenkin turned his mind in the 
direction of the navy; and it was in Buckner's own ship, the 
PROTHEE, 64, that the lad made his only campaign.  It was in the 
days of Rodney's war, when the PROTHEE, we read, captured two large 
privateers to windward of Barbadoes, and was 'materially and 
distinguishedly engaged' in both the actions with De Grasse.  While 
at sea Charles kept a journal, and made strange archaic pilot-book 
sketches, part plan, part elevation, some of which survive for the 
amusement of posterity.  He did a good deal of surveying, so that 
here we may perhaps lay our finger on the beginning of Fleeming's 
education as an engineer.  What is still more strange, among the 
relics of the handsome midshipman and his stay in the gun-room of 
the PROTHEE, I find a code of signals graphically represented, for 
all the world as it would have been done by his grandson.

On the declaration of peace, Charles, because he had suffered from 
scurvy, received his mother's orders to retire; and he was not the 
man to refuse a request, far less to disobey a command.  Thereupon 
he turned farmer, a trade he was to practice on a large scale; and 
we find him married to a Miss Schirr, a woman of some fortune, the 
daughter of a London merchant.  Stephen, the not very reverend, was 
still alive, galloping about the country or skulking in his 
chancel.  It does not appear whether he let or sold the paternal 
manor to Charles; one or other, it must have been; and the sailor-
farmer settled at Stowting, with his wife, his mother, his 
unmarried sister, and his sick brother John.  Out of the six people 
of whom his nearest family consisted, three were in his own house, 
and two others (the horse-leeches, Stephen and Thomas) he appears 
to have continued to assist with more amiability than wisdom.  He 
hunted, belonged to the Yeomanry, owned famous horses, Maggie and 
Lucy, the latter coveted by royalty itself.  'Lord Rokeby, his 
neighbour, called him kinsman,' writes my artless chronicler, 'and 
altogether life was very cheery.'  At Stowting his three sons, 
John, Charles, and Thomas Frewen, and his younger daughter, Anna, 
were all born to him; and the reader should here be told that it is 
through the report of this second Charles (born 1801) that he has 
been looking on at these confused passages of family history.

In the year 1805 the ruin of the Jenkins was begun.  It was the 
work of a fallacious lady already mentioned, Aunt Anne Frewen, a 
sister of Mrs. John.  Twice married, first to her cousin Charles 
Frewen, clerk to the Court of Chancery, Brunswick Herald, and Usher 
of the Black Rod, and secondly to Admiral Buckner, she was denied 
issue in both beds, and being very rich - she died worth about 
60,000L., mostly in land - she was in perpetual quest of an heir.  
The mirage of this fortune hung before successive members of the 
Jenkin family until her death in 1825, when it dissolved and left 
the latest Alnaschar face to face with bankruptcy.  The grandniece, 
Stephen's daughter, the one who had not 'married imprudently,' 
appears to have been the first; for she was taken abroad by the 
golden aunt, and died in her care at Ghent in 1792.  Next she 
adopted William, the youngest of the five nephews; took him abroad 
with her - it seems as if that were in the formula; was shut up 
with him in Paris by the Revolution; brought him back to Windsor, 
and got him a place in the King's Body-Guard, where he attracted 
the notice of George III. by his proficiency in German.  In 1797, 
being on guard at St. James's Palace, William took a cold which 
carried him off; and Aunt Anne was once more left heirless.  
Lastly, in 1805, perhaps moved by the Admiral, who had a kindness 
for his old midshipman, perhaps pleased by the good looks and the 
good nature of the man himself, Mrs. Buckner turned her eyes upon 
Charles Jenkin.  He was not only to be the heir, however, he was to 
be the chief hand in a somewhat wild scheme of family farming.  
Mrs. Jenkin, the mother, contributed 164 acres of land; Mrs. 
Buckner, 570, some at Northiam, some farther off; Charles let one-
half of Stowting to a tenant, and threw the other and various 
scattered parcels into the common enterprise; so that the whole 
farm amounted to near upon a thousand acres, and was scattered over 
thirty miles of country.  The ex-seaman of thirty-nine, on whose 
wisdom and ubiquity the scheme depended, was to live in the 
meanwhile without care or fear.  He was to check himself in 
nothing; his two extravagances, valuable horses and worthless 
brothers, were to be indulged in comfort; and whether the year 
quite paid itself or not, whether successive years left accumulated 
savings or only a growing deficit, the fortune of the golden aunt 
should in the end repair all.

On this understanding Charles Jenkin transported his family to 
Church House, Northiam:  Charles the second, then a child of three, 
among the number.  Through the eyes of the boy we have glimpses of 
the life that followed:  of Admiral and Mrs. Buckner driving up 
from Windsor in a coach and six, two post-horses and their own 
four; of the house full of visitors, the great roasts at the fire, 
the tables in the servants' hall laid for thirty or forty for a 
month together; of the daily press of neighbours, many of whom, 
Frewens, Lords, Bishops, Batchellors, and Dynes, were also 
kinsfolk; and the parties 'under the great spreading chestnuts of 
the old fore court,' where the young people danced and made merry 
to the music of the village band.  Or perhaps, in the depth of 
winter, the father would bid young Charles saddle his pony; they 
would ride the thirty miles from Northiam to Stowting, with the 
snow to the pony's saddle girths, and be received by the tenants 
like princes.

This life of delights, with the continual visible comings and 
goings of the golden aunt, was well qualified to relax the fibre of 
the lads.  John, the heir, a yeoman and a fox-hunter, 'loud and 
notorious with his whip and spurs,' settled down into a kind of 
Tony Lumpkin, waiting for the shoes of his father and his aunt.  
Thomas Frewen, the youngest, is briefly dismissed as 'a handsome 
beau'; but he had the merit or the good fortune to become a doctor 
of medicine, so that when the crash came he was not empty-handed 
for the war of life.  Charles, at the day-school of Northiam, grew 
so well acquainted with the rod, that his floggings became matter 
of pleasantry and reached the ears of Admiral Buckner.  Hereupon 
that tall, rough-voiced, formidable uncle entered with the lad into 
a covenant:  every time that Charles was thrashed he was to pay the 
Admiral a penny; everyday that he escaped, the process was to be 
reversed.  'I recollect,' writes Charles, 'going crying to my 
mother to be taken to the Admiral to pay my debt.'  It would seem 
by these terms the speculation was a losing one; yet it is probable 
it paid indirectly by bringing the boy under remark.  The Admiral 
was no enemy to dunces; he loved courage, and Charles, while yet 
little more than a baby, would ride the great horse into the pond.  
Presently it was decided that here was the stuff of a fine sailor; 
and at an early period the name of Charles Jenkin was entered on a 
ship's books.

From Northiam he was sent to another school at Boonshill, near Rye, 
where the master took 'infinite delight' in strapping him.  'It 
keeps me warm and makes you grow,' he used to say.  And the stripes 
were not altogether wasted, for the dunce, though still very 'raw,' 
made progress with his studies.  It was known, moreover, that he 
was going to sea, always a ground of pre-eminence with schoolboys; 
and in his case the glory was not altogether future, it wore a 
present form when he came driving to Rye behind four horses in the 
same carriage with an admiral.  'I was not a little proud, you may 
believe,' says he.

In 1814, when he was thirteen years of age, he was carried by his 
father to Chichester to the Bishop's Palace.  The Bishop had heard 
from his brother the Admiral that Charles was likely to do well, 
and had an order from Lord Melville for the lad's admission to the 
Royal Naval College at Portsmouth.  Both the Bishop and the Admiral 
patted him on the head and said, 'Charles will restore the old 
family'; by which I gather with some surprise that, even in these 
days of open house at Northiam and golden hope of my aunt's 
fortune, the family was supposed to stand in need of restoration.  
But the past is apt to look brighter than nature, above all to 
those enamoured of their genealogy; and the ravages of Stephen and 
Thomas must have always given matter of alarm.

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 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 
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.'

From 1823 onward, the chief scene of Charles Jenkin's activities 
was in the West Indies, where he was engaged off and on till 1844, 
now as a subaltern, now in a vessel of his own, hunting out 
pirates, 'then very notorious' in the Leeward Islands, cruising 
after slavers, or carrying dollars and provisions for the 
Government.  While yet a midshipman, he accompanied Mr. Cockburn to 
Caraccas and had a sight of Bolivar.  In the brigantine GRIFFON, 
which he commanded in his last years in the West Indies, he carried 
aid to Guadeloupe after the earthquake, and twice earned the thanks 
of Government:  once for an expedition to Nicaragua to extort, 
under threat of a blockade, proper apologies and a sum of money due 
to certain British merchants; and once during an insurrection in 
San Domingo, for the rescue of certain others from a perilous 
imprisonment and the recovery of a 'chest of money' of which they 
had been robbed.  Once, on the other hand, he earned his share of 
public censure.  This was in 1837, when he commanded the ROMNEY 
lying in the inner harbour of Havannah.  The ROMNEY was in no 
proper sense a man-of-war; she was a slave-hulk, the bonded 
warehouse of the Mixed Slave Commission; where negroes, captured 
out of slavers under Spanish colours, were detained provisionally, 
till the Commission should decide upon their case and either set 
them free or bind them to apprenticeship.  To this ship, already an 
eye-sore to the authorities, a Cuban slave made his escape.  The 
position was invidious; on one side were the tradition of the 
British flag and the state of public sentiment at home; on the 
other, the certainty that if the slave were kept, the ROMNEY would 
be ordered at once out of the harbour, and the object of the Mixed 
Commission compromised.  Without consultation with any other 
officer, Captain Jenkin (then lieutenant) returned the man to shore 
and took the Captain-General's receipt.  Lord Palmerston approved 
his course; but the zealots of the anti-slave trade movement (never 
to be named without respect) were much dissatisfied; and thirty-
nine years later, the matter was again canvassed in Parliament, and 
Lord Palmerston and Captain Jenkin defended by Admiral Erskine in a 
letter to the TIMES (March 13, 1876).

In 1845, while still lieutenant, Charles Jenkin acted as Admiral 
Pigot's flag captain in the Cove of Cork, where there were some 
thirty pennants; and about the same time, closed his career by an 
act of personal bravery.  He had proceeded with his boats to the 
help of a merchant vessel, whose cargo of combustibles had taken 
fire and was smouldering under hatches; his sailors were in the 
hold, where the fumes were already heavy, and Jenkin was on deck 
directing operations, when he found his orders were no longer 
answered from below:  he jumped down without hesitation and slung 
up several insensible men with his own hand.  For this act, he 
received a letter from the Lords of the Admiralty expressing a 
sense of his gallantry; and pretty soon after was promoted 
Commander, superseded, and could never again obtain employment.

In 1828 or 1829, Charles Jenkin was in the same watch with another 
midshipman, Robert Colin Campbell Jackson, who introduced him to 
his family in Jamaica.  The father, the Honourable Robert Jackson, 
Custos Rotulorum of Kingston, came of a Yorkshire family, said to 
be originally Scotch; and on the mother's side, counted kinship 
with some of the Forbeses.  The mother was Susan Campbell, one of 
the Campbells of Auchenbreck.  Her father Colin, a merchant in 
Greenock, is said to have been the heir to both the estate and the 
baronetcy; he claimed neither, which casts a doubt upon the fact, 
but he had pride enough himself, and taught enough pride to his 
family, for any station or descent in Christendom.  He had four 
daughters.  One married an Edinburgh writer, as I have it on a 
first account - a minister, according to another - a man at least 
of reasonable station, but not good enough for the Campbells of 
Auchenbreck; and the erring one was instantly discarded.  Another 
married an actor of the name of Adcock, whom (as I receive the 
tale) she had seen acting in a barn; but the phrase should perhaps 
be regarded rather as a measure of the family annoyance, than a 
mirror of the facts.  The marriage was not in itself unhappy; 
Adcock was a gentleman by birth and made a good husband; the family 
reasonably prospered, and one of the daughters married no less a 
man than Clarkson Stanfield.  But by the father, and the two 
remaining Miss Campbells, people of fierce passions and a truly 
Highland pride, the derogation was bitterly resented.  For long the 
sisters lived estranged then, Mrs. Jackson and Mrs. Adcock were 
reconciled for a moment, only to quarrel the more fiercely; the 
name of Mrs. Adcock was proscribed, nor did it again pass her 
sister's lips, until the morning when she announced:  'Mary Adcock 
is dead; I saw her in her shroud last night.'  Second sight was 
hereditary in the house; and sure enough, as I have it reported, on 
that very night Mrs. Adcock had passed away.  Thus, of the four 
daughters, two had, according to the idiotic notions of their 
friends, disgraced themselves in marriage; the others supported the 
honour of the family with a better grace, and married West Indian 
magnates of whom, I believe, the world has never heard and would 
not care to hear:  So strange a thing is this hereditary pride.  Of 
Mr. Jackson, beyond the fact that he was Fleeming's grandfather, I 
know naught.  His wife, as I have said, was a woman of fierce 
passions; she would tie her house slaves to the bed and lash them 
with her own hand; and her conduct to her wild and down-going sons, 
was a mixture of almost insane self-sacrifice and wholly insane 
violence of temper.  She had three sons and one daughter.  Two of 
the sons went utterly to ruin, and reduced their mother to poverty.  
The third went to India, a slim, delicate lad, and passed so wholly 
from the knowledge of his relatives that he was thought to be long 
dead.  Years later, when his sister was living in Genoa, a red-
bearded man of great strength and stature, tanned by years in 
India, and his hands covered with barbaric gems, entered the room 
unannounced, as she was playing the piano, lifted her from her 
seat, and kissed her.  It was her brother, suddenly returned out of 
a past that was never very clearly understood, with the rank of 
general, many strange gems, many cloudy stories of adventure, and 
next his heart, the daguerreotype of an Indian prince with whom he 
had mixed blood.

The last of this wild family, the daughter, Henrietta Camilla, 
became the wife of the midshipman Charles, and the mother of the 
subject of this notice, Fleeming Jenkin.  She was a woman of parts 
and courage.  Not beautiful, she had a far higher gift, the art of 
seeming so; played the part of a belle in society, while far 
lovelier women were left unattended; and up to old age had much of 
both the exigency and the charm that mark that character.  She drew 
naturally, for she had no training, with unusual skill; and it was 
from her, and not from the two naval artists, that Fleeming 
inherited his eye and hand.  She played on the harp and sang with 
something beyond the talent of an amateur.  At the age of 
seventeen, she heard Pasta in Paris; flew up in a fire of youthful 
enthusiasm; and the next morning, all alone and without 
introduction, found her way into the presence of the PRIMA DONNA 
and begged for lessons.  Pasta made her sing, kissed her when she 
had done, and though she refused to be her mistress, placed her in 
the hands of a friend.  Nor was this all, for when Pasta returned 
to Paris, she sent for the girl (once at least) to test her 
progress.  But Mrs. Jenkin's talents were not so remarkable as her 
fortitude and strength of will; and it was in an art for which she 
had no natural taste (the art of literature) that she appeared 
before the public.  Her novels, though they attained and merited a 
certain popularity both in France and England, are a measure only 
of her courage.  They were a task, not a beloved task; they were 
written for money in days of poverty, and they served their end.  
In the least thing as well as in the greatest, in every province of 
life as well as in her novels, she displayed the same capacity of 
taking infinite pains, which descended to her son.  When she was 
about forty (as near as her age was known) she lost her voice; set 
herself at once to learn the piano, working eight hours a day; and 
attained to such proficiency that her collaboration in chamber 
music was courted by professionals.  And more than twenty years 
later, the old lady might have been seen dauntlessly beginning the 
study of Hebrew.  This is the more ethereal part of courage; nor 
was she wanting in the more material.  Once when a neighbouring 
groom, a married man, had seduced her maid, Mrs. Jenkin mounted her 
horse, rode over to the stable entrance and horsewhipped the man 
with her own hand.

How a match came about between this talented and spirited girl and 
the young midshipman, is not very I easy to conceive.  Charles 
Jenkin was one of the finest creatures breathing; loyalty, 
devotion, simple natural piety, boyish cheerfulness, tender and 
manly sentiment in the old sailor fashion, were in him inherent and 
inextinguishable either by age, suffering, or injustice.  He 
looked, as he was, every inch a gentleman; he must have been 
everywhere notable, even among handsome men, both for his face and 
his gallant bearing; not so much that of a sailor, you would have 
said, as like one of those gentle and graceful soldiers that, to 
this day, are the most pleasant of Englishmen to see.  But though 
he was in these ways noble, the dunce scholar of Northiam was to 
the end no genius.  Upon all points that a man must understand to 
be a gentleman, to be upright, gallant, affectionate and dead to 
self, Captain Jenkin was more knowing than one among a thousand; 
outside of that, his mind was very largely blank.  He had indeed a 
simplicity that came near to vacancy; and in the first forty years 
of his married life, this want grew more accentuated.  In both 
families imprudent marriages had been the rule; but neither Jenkin 
nor Campbell had ever entered into a more unequal union.  It was 
the captain's good looks, we may suppose, that gained for him this 
elevation; and in some ways and for many years of his life, he had 
to pay the penalty.  His wife, impatient of his incapacity and 
surrounded by brilliant friends, used him with a certain contempt.  
She was the managing partner; the life was hers, not his; after his 
retirement they lived much abroad, where the poor captain, who 
could never learn any language but his own, sat in the corner 
mumchance; and even his son, carried away by his bright mother, did 
not recognise for long the treasures of simple chivalry that lay 
buried in the heart of his father.  Yet it would be an error to 
regard this marriage as unfortunate.  It not only lasted long 
enough to justify itself in a beautiful and touching epilogue, but 
it gave to the world the scientific work and what (while time was) 
were of far greater value, the delightful qualities of Fleeming 
Jenkin.  The Kentish-Welsh family, facile, extravagant, generous to 
a fault and far from brilliant, had given the father, an extreme 
example of its humble virtues.  On the other side, the wild, cruel, 
proud, and somewhat blackguard stock of the Scotch Campbell-
Jacksons, had put forth, in the person of the mother all its force 
and courage.

The marriage fell in evil days.  In 1823, the bubble of the Golden 
Aunt's inheritance had burst.  She died holding the hand of the 
nephew she had so wantonly deceived; at the last she drew him down 
and seemed to bless him, surely with some remorseful feeling; for 
when the will was opened, there was not found so much as the 
mention of his name.  He was deeply in debt; in debt even to the 
estate of his deceiver, so that he had to sell a piece of land to 
clear himself.  'My dear boy,' he said to Charles, 'there will be 
nothing left for you.  I am a ruined man.'  And here follows for me 
the strangest part of this story.  From the death of the 
treacherous aunt, Charles Jenkin, senior, had still some nine years 
to live; it was perhaps too late for him to turn to saving, and 
perhaps his affairs were past restoration.  But his family at least 
had all this while to prepare; they were still young men, and knew 
what they had to look for at their father's death; and yet when 
that happened in September, 1831, the heir was still apathetically 
waiting.  Poor John, the days of his whips and spurs, and Yeomanry 
dinners, were quite over; and with that incredible softness of the 
Jenkin nature, he settled down for the rest of a long life, into 
something not far removed above a peasant.  The mill farm at 
Stowting had been saved out of the wreck; and here he built himself 
a house on the Mexican model, and made the two ends meet with 
rustic thrift, gathering dung with his own hands upon the road and 
not at all abashed at his employment.  In dress, voice, and manner, 
he fell into mere country plainness; lived without the least care 
for appearances, the least regret for the past or discontentment 
with the present; and when he came to die, died with Stoic 
cheerfulness, announcing that he had had a comfortable time and was 
yet well pleased to go.  One would think there was little active 
virtue to be inherited from such a race; and yet in this same 
voluntary peasant, the special gift of Fleeming Jenkin was already 
half developed.  The old man to the end was perpetually inventing; 
his strange, ill-spelled, unpunctuated correspondence is full (when 
he does not drop into cookery receipts) of pumps, road engines, 
steam-diggers, steam-ploughs, and steam-threshing machines; and I 
have it on Fleeming's word that what he did was full of ingenuity - 
only, as if by some cross destiny, useless.  These disappointments 
he not only took with imperturbable good humour, but rejoiced with 
a particular relish over his nephew's success in the same field.  
'I glory in the professor,' he wrote to his brother; and to 
Fleeming himself, with a touch of simple drollery, 'I was much 
pleased with your lecture, but why did you hit me so hard with 
Conisure's' (connoisseur's, QUASI amateur's) 'engineering?  Oh, 
what presumption! - either of you or MYself!'  A quaint, pathetic 
figure, this of uncle John, with his dung cart and his inventions; 
and the romantic fancy of his Mexican house; and his craze about 
the Lost Tribes which seemed to the worthy man the key of all 
perplexities; and his quiet conscience, looking back on a life not 
altogether vain, for he was a good son to his father while his 
father lived, and when evil days approached, he had proved himself 
a cheerful Stoic.

It followed from John's inertia, that the duty of winding up the 
estate fell into the hands of Charles.  He managed it with no more 
skill than might be expected of a sailor ashore, saved a bare 
livelihood for John and nothing for the rest.  Eight months later, 
he married Miss Jackson; and with her money, bought in some two-
thirds of Stowting.  In the beginning of the little family history 
which I have been following to so great an extent, the Captain 
mentions, with a delightful pride:  'A Court Baron and Court Leet 
are regularly held by the Lady of the Manor, Mrs. Henrietta Camilla 
Jenkin'; and indeed the pleasure of so describing his wife, was the 
most solid benefit of the investment; for the purchase was heavily 
encumbered and paid them nothing till some years before their 
death.  In the meanwhile, the Jackson family also, what with wild 
sons, an indulgent mother and the impending emancipation of the 
slaves, was moving nearer and nearer to beggary; and thus of two 
doomed and declining houses, the subject of this memoir was born, 
heir to an estate and to no money, yet with inherited qualities 
that were to make him known and loved.



CHAPTER II.  1833-1851.



Birth and Childhood - Edinburgh - Frankfort-on-the-Main - Paris - 
The Revolution of 1848 - The Insurrection - Flight to Italy -  
Sympathy with Italy - The Insurrection in Genoa - A Student in 
Genoa - The Lad and his Mother.


HENRY CHARLES FLEEMING JENKIN (Fleeming, pronounced Flemming, to 
his friends and family) was born in a Government building on the 
coast of Kent, near Dungeness, where his father was serving at the 
time in the Coastguard, on March 25, 1833, and named after Admiral 
Fleeming, one of his father's protectors in the navy.

His childhood was vagrant like his life.  Once he was left in the 
care of his grandmother Jackson, while Mrs. Jenkin sailed in her 
husband's ship and stayed a year at the Havannah.  The tragic woman 
was besides from time to time a member of the family she was in 
distress of mind and reduced in fortune by the misconduct of her 
sons; her destitution and solitude made it a recurring duty to 
receive her, her violence continually enforced fresh separations.  
In her passion of a disappointed mother, she was a fit object of 
pity; but her grandson, who heard her load his own mother with 
cruel insults and reproaches, conceived for her an indignant and 
impatient hatred, for which he blamed himself in later life.  It is 
strange from this point of view to see his childish letters to Mrs. 
Jackson; and to think that a man, distinguished above all by 
stubborn truthfulness, should have been brought up to such 
dissimulation.  But this is of course unavoidable in life; it did 
no harm to Jenkin; and whether he got harm or benefit from a so 
early acquaintance with violent and hateful scenes, is more than I 
can guess.  The experience, at least, was formative; and in judging 
his character it should not be forgotten.  But Mrs. Jackson was not 
the only stranger in their gates; the Captain's sister, Aunt Anna 
Jenkin, lived with them until her death; she had all the Jenkin 
beauty of countenance, though she was unhappily deformed in body 
and of frail health; and she even excelled her gentle and 
ineffectual family in all amiable qualities.  So that each of the 
two races from which Fleeming sprang, had an outpost by his very 
cradle; the one he instinctively loved, the other hated; and the 
life-long war in his members had begun thus early by a victory for 
what was best.

We can trace the family from one country place to another in the 
south of Scotland; where the child learned his taste for sport by 
riding home the pony from the moors.  Before he was nine he could 
write such a passage as this about a Hallowe'en observance:  'I 
pulled a middling-sized cabbage-runt with a pretty sum of gold 
about it.  No witches would run after me when I was sowing my 
hempseed this year; my nuts blazed away together very comfortably 
to the end of their lives, and when mamma put hers in which were 
meant for herself and papa they blazed away in the like manner.'  
Before he was ten he could write, with a really irritating 
precocity, that he had been 'making some pictures from a book 
called "Les Francais peints par euxmemes." . . .  It is full of 
pictures of all classes, with a description of each in French.  The 
pictures are a little caricatured, but not much.'  Doubtless this 
was only an echo from his mother, but it shows the atmosphere in 
which he breathed.  It must have been a good change for this art 
critic to be the playmate of Mary Macdonald, their gardener's 
daughter at Barjarg, and to sup with her family on potatoes and 
milk; and Fleeming himself attached some value to this early and 
friendly experience of another class.

His education, in the formal sense, began at Jedburgh.  Thence he 
went to the Edinburgh Academy, where he was the classmate of Tait 
and Clerk Maxwell, bore away many prizes, and was once unjustly 
flogged by Rector Williams.  He used to insist that all his bad 
schoolfellows had died early, a belief amusingly characteristic of 
the man's consistent optimism.  In 1846 the mother and son 
proceeded to Frankfort-on-the-Main, where they were soon joined by 
the father, now reduced to inaction and to play something like 
third fiddle in his narrow household.  The emancipation of the 
slaves had deprived them of their last resource beyond the half-pay 
of a captain; and life abroad was not only desirable for the sake 
of Fleeming's education, it was almost enforced by reasons of 
economy.  But it was, no doubt, somewhat hard upon the captain.  
Certainly that perennial boy found a companion in his son; they 
were both active and eager, both willing to be amused, both young, 
if not in years, then in character.  They went out together on 
excursions and sketched old castles, sitting side by side; they had 
an angry rivalry in walking, doubtless equally sincere upon both 
sides; and indeed we may say that Fleeming was exceptionally 
favoured, and that no boy had ever a companion more innocent, 
engaging, gay, and airy.  But although in this case it would be 
easy to exaggerate its import, yet, in the Jenkin family also, the 
tragedy of the generations was proceeding, and the child was 
growing out of his father's knowledge.  His artistic aptitude was 
of a different order.  Already he had his quick sight of many sides 
of life; he already overflowed with distinctions and 
generalisations, contrasting the dramatic art and national 
character of England, Germany, Italy, and France.  If he were dull, 
he would write stories and poems.  'I have written,' he says at 
thirteen, 'a very long story in heroic measure, 300 lines, and 
another Scotch story and innumerable bits of poetry'; and at the 
same age he had not only a keen feeling for scenery, but could do 
something with his pen to call it up.  I feel I do always less than 
justice to the delightful memory of Captain Jenkin; but with a lad 
of this character, cutting the teeth of his intelligence, he was 
sure to fall into the background.

The family removed in 1847 to Paris, where Fleeming was put to 
school under one Deluc.  There he learned French, and (if the 
captain is right) first began to show a taste for mathematics.  But 
a far more important teacher than Deluc was at hand; the year 1848, 
so momentous for Europe, was momentous also for Fleeming's 
character.  The family politics were Liberal; Mrs. Jenkin, generous 
before all things, was sure to be upon the side of exiles; and in 
the house of a Paris friend of hers, Mrs. Turner - already known to 
fame as Shelley's Cornelia de Boinville - Fleeming saw and heard 
such men as Manin, Gioberti, and the Ruffinis.  He was thus 
prepared to sympathise with revolution; and when the hour came, and 
he found himself in the midst of stirring and influential events, 
the lad's whole character was moved.  He corresponded at that time 
with a young Edinburgh friend, one Frank Scott; and I am here going 
to draw somewhat largely on this boyish correspondence.  It gives 
us at once a picture of the Revolution and a portrait of Jenkin at 
fifteen; not so different (his friends will think) from the Jenkin 
of the end - boyish, simple, opinionated, delighting in action, 
delighting before all things in any generous sentiment.


'February 23, 1848.

'When at 7 o'clock to-day I went out, I met a large band going 
round the streets, calling on the inhabitants to illuminate their 
houses, and bearing torches.  This was all very good fun, and 
everybody was delighted; but as they stopped rather long and were 
rather turbulent in the Place de la Madeleine, near where we live' 
[in the Rue Caumartin] 'a squadron of dragoons came up, formed, and 
charged at a hand-gallop.  This was a very pretty sight; the crowd 
was not too thick, so they easily got away; and the dragoons only 
gave blows with the back of the sword, which hurt but did not 
wound.  I was as close to them as I am now to the other side of the 
table; it was rather impressive, however.  At the second charge 
they rode on the pavement and knocked the torches out of the 
fellows' hands; rather a shame, too - wouldn't be stood in England. 
. . .

[At] 'ten minutes to ten . . . I went a long way along the 
Boulevards, passing by the office of Foreign Affairs, where Guizot 
lives, and where to-night there were about a thousand troops 
protecting him from the fury of the populace.  After this was 
passed, the number of the people thickened, till about half a mile 
further on, I met a troop of vagabonds, the wildest vagabonds in 
the world - Paris vagabonds, well armed, having probably broken 
into gunsmiths' shops and taken the guns and swords.  They were 
about a hundred.  These were followed by about a thousand (I am 
rather diminishing than exaggerating numbers all through), 
indifferently armed with rusty sabres, sticks, etc.  An uncountable 
troop of gentlemen, workmen, shopkeepers' wives (Paris women dare 
anything), ladies' maids, common women - in fact, a crowd of all 
classes, though by far the greater number were of the better 
dressed class - followed.  Indeed, it was a splendid sight:  the 
mob in front chanting the "MARSEILLAISE," the national war hymn, 
grave and powerful, sweetened by the night air - though night in 
these splendid streets was turned into day, every window was filled 
with lamps, dim torches were tossing in the crowd . . . for Guizot 
has late this night given in his resignation, and this was an 
improvised illumination.

'I and my father had turned with the crowd, and were close behind 
the second troop of vagabonds.  Joy was on every face.  I remarked 
to papa that "I would not have missed the scene for anything, I 
might never see such a splendid one," when PLONG went one shot - 
every face went pale - R-R-R-R-R went the whole detachment, [and] 
the whole crowd of gentlemen and ladies turned and cut.  Such a 
scene! - ladies, gentlemen, and vagabonds went sprawling in the 
mud, not shot but tripped up; and those that went down could not 
rise, they were trampled over. . . . I ran a short time straight on 
and did not fall, then turned down a side street, ran fifty yards 
and felt tolerably safe; looked for papa, did not see him; so 
walked on quickly, giving the news as I went.'  [It appears, from 
another letter, the boy was the first to carry word of the firing 
to the Rue St. Honore; and that his news wherever he brought it was 
received with hurrahs.  It was an odd entrance upon life for a 
little English lad, thus to play the part of rumour in such a 
crisis of the history of France.]

'But now a new fear came over me.  I had little doubt but my papa 
was safe, but my fear was that he should arrive at home before me 
and tell the story; in that case I knew my mamma would go half mad 
with fright, so on I went as quick as possible.  I heard no more 
discharges.  When I got half way home, I found my way blocked up by 
troops.  That way or the Boulevards I must pass.  In the Boulevards 
they were fighting, and I was afraid all other passages might be 
blocked up . . . and I should have to sleep in a hotel in that 
case, and then my mamma - however, after a long DETOUR, I found a 
passage and ran home, and in our street joined papa.