Young Man at Sea
The Adventures of John Wetherell. Edited by C. S. Forester. (Michael Joseph. 18s.) LOOKING back from the disappointments of middle-age on the adventures of his youth, John Wetherell spent his leisure hours in the 1820s in copying, and where necessary embroidering, the journals which he had kept since his early days at sea. Mr. C. S. Forester has now edited that section of the manuscript which covers the years 1803 to 1814.
The text (enlivened with some pleasant drawings by the author) seems in the main to be contemporary, with only a reasonable proportion of the later licence and addition which apparently com- plicate other parts of the fair copy. Its story falls into two distinct parts. From March, 1803, to January, 1804, Wetherell served as a pressed man in H.M. Frigate Hussar: from January, 1804, tp May, 1814, he was a prisoner of war in France. The account of life afloat adds only marginally to the picture we already possess. Wetherell ,f had the misfortune to be pressed into an unhappy ship. Making revery allowance, Captain Philip Wilkinson of the Hussar—" his heart as full of Devils as the whole herd of Swine"—was a brute. Wetherell alleges (which is new) that he had been largely to blame for one notorious mutiny. He might soon have caused another, if . faulty navigation had not intervened. The account of life under such is man is fairly familiar: so too, it should be noted, are Wetherell's !:reactions. He tried, as others tried in similar circumstances, to ' desert; he signed a round-robin to his Admiral asking for an r'exchange; and he was unaffectedly glad when he found himself out of the ship. But he fought well when called on to do so, and gives due credit to the rest of his officers.
But the Hussar, on passage home from the Atlantic blockade, was wrecked on the Saints off Brest, and most of her company was taken prisoner. From this point, Wetherell's story breaks fresh ,ground. We know compardtively little of the experiences of British prisoners of war in the Napoleonic Wars; and the account of his progress to the fortress of Givet, of his life there over the next ten years, and above all of his return journey in the last days of the crumbling Empire, adds much to our information. He seems to have been fortunate both in his place of detention and in his experiences on the way. The Napoleonic system supervised the passage of prisoners of war in almost exactly the same way as that of French soldiers on draft: they moved, only under escort, with orders covering the day's march, reporting to the local authority—military or civil- * its close, and calling on him for food and accommodation. .'Wetherell did not find it an unpleasant mode of travel, particularly Pater the miseries he had recently endured. Nor did Givet itself 'prove a harsh prison. Its inhabitants indeed seem to have been an easy lot, who apart from occasional attempts to escape (the tunnel makes its inevitable appearance) soon settled down to the reasonable liberties and amusements allowed. The British sailors were even called on, at short notice, to ferry the Emperor and his suite across the Meuse, a service which they performed with cheerfulness.
But the climax of the journal is the return journey in 1814. Removed from their frontier fortress as the Allied armies approached, the prisoners of war were sent in detachments with no fixed desti- nation into the interior. Wetherell travelled as part of the prison band, which managed to keep together, playing its way, with it enthusiastic escorts, across the troubled countryside. The march became almost a holiday; and there can scarcely be a more delightful description of the fall of an Empire than this light-hearted account of the band's triumphant progress, in the spring, through the little provincial towns. When Wetherell himself reaches the embarkation point, and sails for England with a piece of execrable verse, we are genuinely sorry to take leave of a spirited and amusing companion, JOHN EHINAH
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