I should have mentioned that antecedent to this I had been Commander of the China Flagship. I wished very much for the Mediterranean Flagship; but my life-long and good friend Lord Walter Kerr was justly preferred before me. The Pacific Flagship was also vacant; and I think the Admiral wanted me there, but I had a wonderful good friend at the Admiralty, Sir Beauchamp Seymour, afterwards Lord Alcester, who was determined I should go to China. So to China I went; and, as it happened, it turned out trumps, for the Admiral got softening of the brain, and I was told that when he got home and attended at the Admiralty I was the only thing in his mind; the only thing he could say was “Fisher!” And this luckily helped me in my promotion to Post Captain. After starting the “Vernon” as Torpedo School of the Navy and partaking in a mission to Fiume to arrange for the purchase of the Whitehead Torpedo, I was sent at an hour’s notice overland to Malta, where on entering the harbour I noticed an old tramp picking up her anchor, and on enquiry found she was going to Constantinople, where the ship I was to command was with the Fleet under Sir Geoffrey Hornby. I went alongside, got up a rope ladder that was hanging over the side and pulled up my luggage with a rope’s end, when the Captain of the Tramp came up to me and said: “Hullo!” I said “Hullo!” He said “What is it you want?” He didn’t know who I was, and I was in plain clothes, just as I had travelled over the Continent, and I replied: “I’m going with you to Constantinople to join my ship”; and he said “There ain’t room; there’s only one bunk, and when I ain’t in it the mate is.” I said “All right, I don’t want a bunk.” And he said “Well, we ain’t got no cook.” And I said “That don’t matter either.” That man and I till he died were like Jonathan and David. He was a magnificent specimen of those splendid men who command our merchant ships--I worshipped the ground he trod on. His mate was just as good. They kept watch and watch, and it was a hard life. I said to him one day “Captain, I never see you take sights.” “Well,” he said, “Why should I? When I leaves one lamp-post I steers for the other” (meaning lighthouses); “and,” he says, “I trusts my engineer. He gives me the revolutions what the engine has made, and I know exactly where I am. And,” he says, “when you have been going twenty years on the same road and no other road, you gets to know exactly how to do it.” “Well,” I said, “what do you do about your compass? are you sure it’s correct? In the Navy, you know, we’re constantly looking at the sun when it sets, and that’s an easy way of seeing that the compass is right.” “Well,” he said, “what I does is this. I throws a cask overboard, and when it’s as far off as ever I can see it, I turns the ship round on her axis. I takes the bearing of the cask at every point of the compass, I adds ’em all up, divides the total by the number of bearings, which gives me the average, and