It must not be supposed that the navy captain, who was a mere brute, was always a man of obscure birth. In August 1742 a court martial was held at Spithead for the trial of an officer, who, if long descent, rank, and family connections were always, and not only as a rule, enough to form a gentleman, ought assuredly to have been one. This was the Honourable William Hervey, third son of the first Earl of Bristol of the name. He had been captain of the =Superb=, 60, in the fleet which sailed for the West Indies under Sir Chaloner Ogle in 1740, and he was proved to the satisfaction of a court composed of brother officers, and presided over by Admiral Cavendish, to have been guilty of conduct surpassing anything Smollett has described in his grim pictures of the navy. His first and second lieutenants, the gunner and purser of his ship, swore that he beat an old seaman named White so brutally that the man was carried insensible to his hammock, and died there accusing the captain of being the cause of his death; that he often beat the quarter-masters from the wheel with a cudgel, and had on one occasion actually endangered the ship in this way, during a paroxysm of rage; that he once threw a paper under the table of his cabin, ordered a subordinate to pick it up, and kicked him while on his knees, to the peril of his life; that he injured his gunner seriously by a foul kick; that he thrashed his purser on the deck at Kinsale; that he threatened to beat all his officers, “from the first lieutenant to the cook’s boy,” and that he not only abounded in abusive terms, but enforced them by insulting gestures. Captain Hervey’s defence consisted of the plea that he was never violent in word or action except when he was provoked, and in an unsupported counter-charge of cruelty to certain Spanish prisoners against his first lieutenant, which the court dismissed. It is consistent enough that while violent captains behaved with a brutality never heard of now except among the roughest and most ignorant class of the community, officers of weak character had some difficulty in obtaining ordinary respect from their subordinates. The discipline of the navy, in the highest sense of the word, was bad, though its mere drill might be sound. There was not as yet a standard of conduct, a prevailing spirit of honour to control and inspire all alike.