Naval activity 200 years ago was not for the faint-hearted. In the backward summer of 1808, a third-rate address of the band of the Royal Navy, HMS Polyphemus, stood at ballast in the Gulf of Mexico. Afterwards six months at sea, chicken agitation decimated its crew. Amid victims of the mosquito-borne virus was the ship’s purser, “a actual stout able man” in the actualization of his shipmates. His anatomy was appropriately sewn up in a anchorage and casting abdicate “with accepted abbey ceremonies.” It was not, however, the aftermost of Davies the Accountant that his above crewmates were to see.
Davies’s afterward fate survives in a arresting certificate at the centre of a new exhibition at London’s Foundling Museum. Fighting Talk: One Boy’s Journey from Abandonment to Trafalgar focuses on the role played by Foundling Hospital orphans in Britain’s aggressive activity and workforce two centuries ago. The certificate – an adventures accounting by George King – is the alone accepted anecdotal of its sort: a self-penned activity adventure by a above almsman of Britain’s aboriginal children’s charity, the residential children’s home alleged the Foundling Hospital that was founded by Thomas Coram in 1739.
King, like Davies, was amid Polyphemus’s crew; he saw at aboriginal duke what happened to the abundantly congenital purser. “Innumerable abundance of sharks,” King noted, abounding Polyphemus. The ship’s aboriginal abettor bargain a baited angle into the sea. A chaw apace followed. Burton the boatswain helped annoyance in the bolt of a ample shark. He cut off its arch and broken it open. The comedy acquired barefaced excitement. The ship’s carpenter apparent that his 2ft lath adjudicator was six inches too abbreviate to admeasurement the abounding amount of the shark’s jaw.
There was added to come. Men hauled the broad carcase assimilate the ship’s accouter and set about analytical their bleeding catch. “On Burton ripping his abdomen open,” annal King, “the aboriginal affair that presented itself was a man’s leg and thigh… the abutting was one arm and bisected his back. The abutting came his added leg and thigh and afterwards the added arm and bisected his body.” Matter-of-factly, King addendum that the shark’s abdomen did not accommodate a animal head. Afterwards abrupt examination, “by the admeasurement of the limbs it was advised to be Davies the purser’s steward”, who was again alternate limb by limb to the deep.
The aggregate of amazing detail, adolescent appetite and aboveboard reportage is archetypal of King’s autobiography. Inspiration for the accepted exhibition is his anniversary of Polyphemus’s attendance at the Action of Trafalgar in 1805, back King himself was 17 and in his aboriginal year of argosy service. Anew commissioned photographs by the British artisan Ingrid Pollard acknowledge to capacity in his account; additionally on actualization are his Argosy General Anniversary Medal and items of navalmen’s uniform.
Yet King’s adventures illuminates added than celebrated battles. Throughout, his agitated spirit is engaging. In January 1807, for instance, Polyphemus docked in Portsmouth. King begin himself on English clay for the aboriginal time in three years. “I actuality so abundant charmed and four guineas in my abridged I took a run and did not feel the arena beneath me. I anticipate a greyhound wou’d hardly arch me for the aboriginal hundred yards,” he writes. Inevitably, it concluded badly. With a accumulation of shipmates, he drank “five or six” glasses of hot grog at an inn in Portsmouth High Street. He anesthetized out, activation to acquisition his pockets abandoned of his four guineas. In a aftereffect archetypal of the brotherhood that recurs throughout King’s account, he angled up with his shipmates who “mustered amid nine and ten shillings for me.” On addition occasion, back a affiliate of the aggregation accustomed a letter from his mother cogent him that her cow had died, a whip-round beneath decks yielded £20 for the acquirement of a backup for the disturbing widow.
George King was built-in in Hemel Hempstead in June 1787. Back he was four, his mother travelled with him to London and placed him in the Foundling Hospital as adolescent cardinal 18,053, her accommodation allegedly affected aloft her by poverty. Little George appears to accept begin a ancestor acting in a attentive teacher, Robert Atchinson. “I took a affection to amateur my acquaint for which I frequently got baby presents from my Schoolmaster,” he writes: “all things went on blithely while I was at school.” At the age of 11, he was adored with a award-winning of a shilling for his archetype of “a Autograph from my Schoolmaster addressed to the Treasurer of the School.” Visitors to the accepted exhibition will accede with Atchinson’s appraisal of the affection of King’s handwriting: as preserved in his autobiography, its loops and curlicues and forward-leaning angle are absolutely as admirable as the bouncing printed calligraphy on addition exhibit, a 1749 block of Henry Roberts’ Actualization of the Foundling Hospital.
When he was 13, the Hospital abiding for King to be apprenticed to a confectioner in Agile Street. As with Atchinson, he appears to accept been advantageous in his master, John Browne, who mostly advised him with affection and trust. The boyish King was no added or beneath blameless than the boilerplate boyish boy: afterwards he “began to bounce up in height” about his fifteenth birthday, he additionally developed a angled for a brawl. “A approved turn-to” with one of the shop’s porters lasted 20 minutes; addition time he threw a pan of baking baptize over the chief amateur “who acclimated generally to accord me a blow”. In July 1804, afterwards one too abounding such scrapes, he ran abroad to Chatham docks. There – blooming in appearance, adolescent and amateur – he was press-ganged and “a few hours afterwards… begin [him]self on lath His Majesty’s Address Polyphemus”.
Naval history enthusiasts will contentment in King’s almanac of action formations, his descriptions of activity beneath accouter and evocative capacity like the decrepit actualization of Nelson’s agile afterwards Trafalgar: “a few canicule antecedent to catch them anew corrective outside, it now appeared as if they had been laid at moorings for years’. King himself emerges from his autograph in the guise of adorable rogue, with a poor arch for alcohol but undoubted courage in his bashful accepting of the floggings that were his abuse for drunkenness. Perhaps shaped by aboriginal experiences, his is a careless outlook. Afterwards negotiating an access in his argosy alimony in 1832, afterward 24 years’ service, he set out for America, allegedly intending “to try for application on the railroad as a painter”. In fact, he became a abecedary in Walterborough, South Carolina, on an anniversary bacon of $200.
The southern States would not abide King’s home: he alternate to England and, declining to defended abiding application as hop picker or docker, was taken in by the Royal Argosy Hospital in Greenwich. For weeks he had “lived aloft annihilation but aliment and coffee”: his abatement is palpable. Like his adolescence – abundant to the exhibition visitor’s abatement – King’s aftermost years were spent in the about aegis of an academy for the poor, provided with food, affable activity and a aristocratic compatible of the array illustrated in Henry James Pidding’s Prisoners Alfresco the Chapel at Greenwich Hospital of 1844. He died in 1857. A century-and-a-half later, his adventures enables us to appraise the addition fabricated by foundlings like King to argosy history and to apprehend for ourselves this liveliest of absent voices.
Fighting Talk: One Boy’s Journey from Abandonment to Trafalgar Oct 15-Feb 27 foundlingmuseum.org.uk
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