Famous Fighters of the Fleet: Glimpses through the Cannon Smoke in the Days of the Old NavyFraser, Edward
History
Famous Fighters of the Fleet: Glimpses through the Cannon Smoke in the Days of the Old Navy
Fraser, Edward
Great Britain -- History, Naval; Naval battles -- Great Britain
Now the sunset breezes shiver,
_Temeraire! Temeraire!_
And she's fading down the river,
_Temeraire! Temeraire!_
Now the sunset breezes shiver,
And she's fading down the river,
But in England's song for ever
She's the _Fighting Temeraire_.[83]
The Fighting _Temeraire_ tugged to her last berth to be broken up,'
was the title Turner gave his picture when he sent it in to the Royal
Academy Exhibition of 1839. He added these lines, composed apparently
by himself--
'The flag that braved the battle and the breeze
No longer owns her.'
The 'Fighting' _Temeraire_ was an Essex ship, built--nine-tenths of
her--of oak cut in Hainault forest and sent across to Chatham dockyard,
where the _Temeraire's_ keel was laid in July 1793.[84] Tuesday,
the 11th of September 1798, was the day of her launch, 'a squally
day with drenching rain.' She was a three-decker, a second-rate, 'a
ninety-eight,' in the Navy parlance of the time, a ship carrying
ninety-eight guns (32-pounders, 18's, and long 12's, with twelve
carronades as well), throwing a broadside weight of metal at each
discharge of 1336 lbs., very nearly twelve cwts.--three-fifths of a ton
of solid cast iron. 'She is one of the finest ships that we have seen,'
wrote an officer who inspected the _Temeraire_ on the stocks a little
while before she was launched.
An Essex man captained the _Temeraire_ at Trafalgar, Eliab Harvey, of
Rolls Park, Chigwell, Essex. He was a great-grandson of Eliab Harvey,
brother of Dr. William Harvey the discoverer of the circulation of the
blood, by whose side he now lies buried in the family vault under the
Harvey Chapel in Hempstead Church, near Saffron Walden. All Essex, we
are told, was represented at the funeral, or followed the coffin to its
last resting-place. Captain Harvey, during the time that he commanded
the _Temeraire_, had also a seat in Parliament for the county of Essex,
in accordance with a political usage of those days which enabled
officers on active service to represent constituencies at Westminster,
although Ministers apparently did not always find it satisfactory.
'I don't like your M.P. Navy Captains,' said Castlereagh once; 'they
are always off Cape Finisterre when they are wanted, and when they
are sent for they say they don't like being "whistled up merely to
give a vote."' Those who know their Marryat will remember the case of
the Hon. Captain Delmar, M.P., of H.M.S. _Paragon_, a frigate in the
Channel Squadron, 'which was never sea-going except in the Recess.' It
was better though than this with the _Temeraire_, which Captain Harvey
commissioned for the 'Western Squadron,' as in those days the Channel
Fleet was generally called, at Plymouth, in November 1803, six months
after the outbreak of the Great War with Napoleon.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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