In 1765 Samuel Pellew died, leaving a widow and six children; of whom Edward, the second, was born at Dover, 19th April, 1757. In 1765 he removed with his mother to Penzance; and here, when quite a child, gave an early instance of his love of the 'pomp and circumstance of glorious war,' by walking all the way from Penzance to Helston, in order to follow a troop of soldiers; and of his indomitable courage, when somewhat older, by removing from a burning house a quantity of gunpowder which had been stored there. He frequently played truant from school in order to get into a boat at the quay; and was a great favourite with the loafers there, who taught him to box. Bottrell says that Mrs. Pellew and her family lived in a thatched cottage 'near the Alverton entrance to Fox's gardens;' the house still stands, on the left-hand side of the road as the traveller leaves Penzance for the Land's End. The Truro Grammar School, where the Rev. R. Polwhele was one of his schoolfellows, as appears from his 'Reminiscences,'[122] was the next scene of his combative energy; and here he thrashed so many of his schoolfellows, that, in order to escape a still severer thrashing with which the head-master (then Mr. Conon) threatened him, he ran away, and--against his grandfather's consent, but luckily for English glory, and for his own fame--went to sea. Whilst at Truro, hastening through the courtyard of the Red Lion Hotel to assist in putting out a fire, Pellew found the high back gate shut; but he sprang over it, and I remember the spot being pointed out to me in evidence of his strength and agility. His freaks on the water in after-life were of the most daring kind, and he often set the example on board ship, when no sailor could be found bold and active enough to perform some dangerous act of seamanship. In the year 1770, being then about thirteen or fourteen years of age, Edward Pellew entered the Navy in the _Juno_, and went his first voyage to the Falkland Islands. Thence, under the same captain (Stott), he sailed in the _Alarm_ to the Mediterranean, where, at Marseilles--a place which he was destined afterwards to save from destruction by its own inhabitants--he left the ship, in consequence of a gross and uncalled-for insult inflicted by the Captain on one of Pellew's brother midshipmen, named Cole. He next joined the _Blonde_, under Captain Pownoll--who had been trained in the school of another Cornish naval hero, Admiral Boscawen--and with whom he soon became a prime favourite. It was on board the _Blonde_ that he so alarmed and amused General Burgoyne, by standing on his head on the yard-arm when the General came on board to make his ill-starred expedition to America; and from the fore-yard of the same ship Pellew sprang to rescue a man who had fallen overboard. His magnificent physique and perfect courage enabled him to perform similar services on more than one occasion.