The perilous nature of the task he was taking in hand did not, however, count with the gallant officer who had charge of the _Zebra_. He was used to taking risks. Commander Faulknor had already in this campaign shown the stuff he was made of, and that not once nor twice. He was not the man to blench here. The commander of the _Zebra_ was indeed a man in a thousand. Hardly a finer fellow in every respect than Robert Faulknor ever trod the quarter-deck of a British man-of-war in any age. He could not, perhaps, well help being so. If ever a British naval officer had the sea 'in his blood,' as the old saying went, Faulknor had it. Not many families ever did more for the Sea Service than the Faulknors of Hampshire in the eighteenth century. A round dozen of its sons, as captains and admirals, walked the quarter-deck in the times between Queen Anne and William the Fourth. As a fact, he owed his very origin to a naval romance. His father was 'Bob Faulknor of the _Bellona_,' perhaps the most popular man in the service in his day, who in the first year of George the Third's reign took a big French 74, the _Courageux_, off the coast of Spain, in a ship-to-ship duel fought out to the bitter end, and won a fortune and a beautiful bride, our hero's mother, at one and the same time. The newspapers were full of the dashing fight, a story full of incidents of heroism on the part of the _Bellona's_ captain, and the young lady reading the story there, gave her heart to the gallant captain she had never seen. Meeting 'Captain Bob' on his return to England at a ball, quite by chance, he for his part, in turn, fell violently in love with her, and they married and lived afterwards the happiest of wedded lives. Commander Faulknor's grandfather was old Admiral Balchen's flag-captain, who was lost with his veteran chief and upwards of a thousand officers and men, in the wreck of the _Victory_ of George the Second's fleet, the predecessor of Nelson's _Victory_, off the Caskets near Alderney, one stormy October night of the year 1744. Commander Faulknor's great-grandfather got his lieutenant's commission three years after the battle of La Hogue, fought all through 'Queen Anne's War,' and died in George the First's reign, Lieutenant-Governor of Greenwich Hospital. Such was the stock that Commander Faulknor came of.