Eighteenth Century Vignettes

In these days of steam power, and floating palaces, and luxurious sick-room appliances, it is not easy to realize the intolerable tedium and discomfort, especially to an invalid, of a passage in a second-rate sailing-ship in the middle of the last century. When, after a rapid but fatiguing two hours' drive, Fielding reached Redriff (Rotherhithe), he had to undergo a further penance. The 'Queen of Portugal' lay in midstream, a circumstance which necessitated his being carried perilously across slippery ground, transferred to a wherry, and finally hoisted over the ship's side in a chair. Nor were his troubles by any means at an end when he found himself securely deposited in the cabin. The voyage, already more than once deferred, was again postponed. First, the vessel could not be cleared at the Custom House until Thursday, because Wednesday was a holiday (Proclamation Day); then the skipper himself announced that he should not weigh anchor before Saturday. Meanwhile, from his unusual exertions and other causes, Fielding's main malady had gained so considerably that he was obliged to summon Dr. William Hunter from Covent Garden to tap him – an operation which he had already more than once undergone with considerable relief. On Sunday the vessel dropped down to Gravesend, reaching the Nore on July 1. Then, for a week, they were becalmed in the Downs, making Ryde just in time to lie safely on the Motherbank during a violent storm. Before the ship left Ryde, the 23rd of July had arrived; and it was not until the second week in August that she sailed up the Tagus, having taken seven weeks to perform a journey which then, at most, occupied three, and is now generally accomplished in about four days.

If the 'Journal of a Voyage to Lisbon' were no more than the chronicle of the facts thus summarized – nay, if it were no more than what Walpole flippantly calls the 'account how his [Fielding's] dropsy was treated and teased by an innkeeper's wife in the Isle of Wight,' it would require and deserve but little consideration. That it is a literary masterpiece is not pretended; nor, in the circumstances of its composition, could a masterpiece be looked for – even from a master. But it is interesting not so much by the events which it narrates as by the indirect light which it throws upon its writer's character, upon his manliness, his patience, and that inextinguishable cheerfulness which, he says in the 'Proposal for the Poor,' 'was always natural to me.' His sufferings must have been considerable (he had to be tapped again before the voyage ended); and yet, with the exception of some not resentful comment upon the inhumanity of certain watermen and sailors who had jeered at his ghastly appearance, no word of complaint as to his own condition is allowed to escape him. On the other hand, his solicitude for his fellow-travellers is unmistakable. One of the most touching pages in the little volume relates how, when his wife, worn out with toothache, lay sleeping lightly in the state room, he and the skipper, who was deaf, sat speechless over a 'small bowl of punch' in the adjoining cabin rather than run the risk of waking her by a sound. 'My dear wife and child,' he says, speaking of a storm in the Channel, 'must pardon me, if what I did not conceive to be any great evil to myself, I was not much terrified with the thoughts of happening to them: in truth, I have often thought they are both too good, and too gentle, to be trusted to the power of any man I know, to whom they could possibly be so trusted.' In another place he relates, quite in his best manner, how he rebuked a certain churlish Custom-house officer for his want of courtesy to Mrs. Fielding. At times one forgets that it is a dying man who is writing, so invincible is that appetite for enjoyment which made Lady Mary say he ought to have been immortal. Not long after they reached Ryde he wrote to his half-brother and successor John (afterwards Sir John) Fielding: 'I beg that on the Day you receive this Mrs. Daniel [his mother-in-law] may know that we are just risen from Breakfast in Health and Spirits [the italics are ours] this twelfth Instant at 9 in the morning.' At Ryde they were shamefully entreated by the most sharp-faced and tyrannical of landladies, in whose incommodious hostelry they sought temporary refuge; and yet it is at Ryde that he chronicles 'the best, the pleasantest, and the merriest meal [in a barn], with more appetite, more real, solid luxury, and more festivity, than was ever seen in an entertainment at White's.' And almost the last lines of the 'Journal' recall a good supper in a Lisbon coffee-house for which they 'were as well charged, as if the bill had been made on the Bath road, between Newbury and London.' But the pleasures of the table play a subordinate part in the sick man's diary, and often only prompt a larger subject, as when the John Dory which regales them at Torbay introduces a disquisition on the improvement of the London fish supply. As might be anticipated, some of his best passages deal with the humanity about him. With characteristic reticence, he says little of his own companions, but his pen strays easily into graphic sketches of the little' world of the 'Queen of Portugal.' The ill-conditioned Custom-house officer, already mentioned; the military fop who comes to visit the captain at Spithead; the sordid and shrewish Ryde landlady with her chuckleheaded nonentity of a husband – are all touched by a hand which, if tremulous, betrays no diminution of its cunning. Of all the potraits, however, that of the skipper is the best. 13

The rough, illiterate, septuagenarian sea-captain, 'full of strange oaths' and superstitions, despotic, irascible and good-natured, awkwardly gallanting the ladies in all the splendours of a red coat, cockade and sword, and heart-broken, privateer though he had been, when his favourite kitten is smothered by a feather-bed, has all the elements of a finished individuality. It is with respect to him that occurs almost the only really dramatic incident of the voyage. A violent dispute having arisen about the exclusive right of the passengers to the cabin, Fielding resolved, not without misgivings, to quit the ship, ordering a hoy for that purpose, and taking care, as became a magistrate, to threaten Captain Veal with what that worthy feared more than rock or quicksand, the terrors of retributary legal proceedings. The rest may be told in the journalist's own words: 'The most distant sound of law thus frightened a man, who had often, I am convinced, heard numbers of cannon roar round him with intrepidity. Nor did he sooner see the hoy approaching the vessel, than he ran down again into the cabin, and, his rage being perfectly subsided, he tumbled on his knees, and a little too abjectly implored for mercy.

'I did not suffer a brave man and an old man, to remain a moment in this posture; but I immediately forgave him.' Most of those who have related this anecdote end discreetly at this point. Fielding, however, is too honest to allow us to place his forbearance entirely to the credit of his magnanimity. 'And here, that I may not be thought the sly trumpeter of my own praises, I do utterly disclaim all praise on the occasion. Neither did the greatness of my mind dictate, nor the force of my Christianity exact this forgiveness. To speak truth, I forgave him from a motive which would make men much more forgiving, if they were much wiser than they are; because it was convenient for me so to do.'

With the arrival of the 'Queen of Portugal' at Lisbon the 'Journal' ends, and no further particulars of its writer are forthcoming. Two months later he died in the Portuguese capital, and was buried among the cypresses of the beautiful English cemetery. Luget Britannia gremio non dari Fovere natum– is inscribed upon his tomb.