Frederick Marryat, Part 1

Frederick Marryat, Captain Marryat as he became, is the most celebrated person ever to have lived in Langham, though he only moved here permanently at the age of 51 and died five years later. Indeed, a loke in the village is named after him.

He was characterised by a naval historian as follows: ‘… energetic beyond the ordinary, gifted in diverse ways, never common-place, uncertain in temper and behaviour, and, like many other men and women, tending to overvalue the past as it receded.’

He was born in London on 10 July 1792 to Joseph Marryat and his wife Charlotte (née von Geyer), an American from Boston of German descent. Frederick’s grandfather was Dr Thomas Marryat, the eccentric physician and wit who had died in Bristol just before Frederick’s birth.

Joseph Marryat was descended from Huguenot refugees who had come to England following the St Bartholomew’s Day massacres in 1572. He was very wealthy, not only by inheritance and marriage, but also from his own activities: he was a shipowner and the Chairman of Lloyd’s, and became Tory MP for Horsham and then Sandwich. He had invested in plantations in the West Indies, was colonial agent for Grenada, a slave-owner himself and a strong anti-abolitionist. The family lived at Sydenham and Wimbledon.

Frederick, the second of fifteen children, was educated at Mr Freeman’s academy, Holmwood School, at Ponder’s End, Enfield, where one of his classmates was Charles Babbage, the polymath later credited as the father of the digital computer.

Frederick’s boisterous character often got him into scrapes: he ran away from school twice with the idea of going to sea. So determined was he that his father arranged for him to join the naval frigate Impérieuse, 38 guns, under Captain Lord Cochrane, which he did as a midshipman in September 1806, aged 14. He served thereafter in various vessels and saw much action. In 1809, during the ill-fated Walcheren Campaign, the young Marryat caught the so-called ‘Walcheren Fever’ (malaria) which killed nearly 4000 British troops and troubled him for the rest of his days.

Evacuation of ailing British troops from Walcheren, 1809

He was returned to England aboard HMS Victorious.

In 1810 he was serving in the Mediterranean aboard HMS Centaur, the flagship of Sir Samuel Hood; in 1811 he sailed to the West Indies and North America on HMS Aeolus and later served aboard HMS Spartan. In September 1812 he was sent home aboard the Indian.

He passed for lieutenant that October. However, because he had not been christened ‘according to the rules of the Established Church of England’, promotion was delayed until 26 December. In January he joined HMS Espiègle and returned to the West Indies, but in April his health declined and he was invalided. Although in 1814 he joined the frigate HMS Newcastle under Captain Lord George Stuart, fighting American privateers, his health again let him down and he was sent home.

Marryat as a young man

In 1815, promoted commander, he served aboard the sloop HMS Beaver off the island of St Helena, to prevent any attempt to rescue Napoleon Bonaparte from his exile there, but Marryat’s health was still poor and he left the ship at Madeira.

He had always been interested in science, and in 1818 he published his design for a lifeboat, for which, and for his selfless courage in rescuing people at sea, he was awarded the honorary gold medallion of the Humane Society. A year later he married Catherine, the second daughter of Sir Stephen Sharp, for many years Consul-General in Russia. And in the same year, 1819, under the aegis of Charles Babbage, he was elected Fellow of the Royal Society for his A Code of Signals for the Merchant Service, published in 1817. Sales of this work earned him a substantial income and in 1833 he was awarded the Légion d’honneur, which, ironically, had been instituted by Napoleon in 1802.

Unlike his father, Frederick was a radical at heart: at about this time he published articles critical of the practice of impressment for recruiting seamen, but these were badly received by the establishment.

In 1820 Marryat was in command of HMS Beaver, again on guardship duty around St Helena. But Napoleon was already dying. General Bertrand in his notes (page 261, Les Cahiers, 6 May 1821) says, ‘At 10 o’clock Mr Ibbetson and the frigate Captain Marryat came to draw the Emperor on his deathbed. It appears Mr Marryat had achieved a fairly good likeness’.

Marryat later made various versions of this sketch, some of which were turned into engravings and widely published in Britain, such was the enduring fascination with ‘the Antichrist’, as he is called by Anna Pávlovna Schérer in War and Peace.

In 1824 Frederick was the senior naval officer at Rangoon and fought in the First Anglo-Burmese War, being the first Royal Navy officer to use a steamship in wartime. He joined another ill-fated, disease-ridden expedition, this time up the Bassein River; the following year he was given the command of HMS Tees. In 1826 he is recorded as returning to England; on 26 December he was nominated a Companion of the Bath. In 1829, commanding the frigate HMS Ariadne, he was engaged in chart-marking in the treacherous waters around Madeira and the Canaries.

His semi-autobiographical novel, The Naval Officer, or Scenes in the Life and Adventures of Frank Mildmay, was published that same year; he had already drafted The King’s Own.

Joseph Marryat had died in 1824. In 1830 his son Frederick, endowed with a patrimony of half a million pounds and weary of the dangers and privations of the sea, decided to embark on a literary career. He resigned from the Navy, sold his family residence at Sussex House, Hammersmith, and purchased an estate of a thousand acres at Langham, though he was not to settle there until 1843.

The first and most turbulent period of Captain Marryat’s life was over; his chief fame was yet to come.