FIRST COMMODORE

Posted by Admin on 25 May 2006, 12:00 am

Allowing for the fact that memoirs often tend
to eulogise, he would appear a paragon –
benevolent, to anger slow, hospitable,
and wise –
a man considered worthy of a monument,
the obelisk extant on Bembridge Down, towards which
his yachting colleagues gave two hundred pounds.
A wealthy man, to boot, the Falcon, launched
by List of Wootton Bridge in eighteen twenty-four
(a full-rigged ship employing fifty men) a toy within
his means.
But, strangely antinomic, his biographers
recount express demands for naval discipline,
which meant the cat-o’-nine-tails might be used
for misdemeanour – edicts inconsistent with
his Lordship’s known humanity.
Of charitable mind, we much prefer to think
that this outrageous Yarborough hand was never played.