blockade. With magnificent skill and daring Blackwood, in the little Penelope, hung on the great Frenchman's quarter, and raked her for long hours till the day broke. Then the Lion came up, and waged an unequal fight with the Frenchman. Last of all, the bluff-bowed and lumbering Foudroyant arrived on the scene of action; arrived, indeed, in a sort of breathless hurry which wellnigh defeated its own end. 'We did not fire a shot till we were within hail,' Berry tells Nelson in the excited letter he wrote after the fight was over. There never was a more gallant and obstinate defence than that which the Guillaume Tell offered to her assailants. The Foudroyant, superior to her in weight of fire, lay broadside on to the Frenchman; the Lion hung on her starboard quarter; the Penelope raked her bows. Yet the Guillaume Tell fought her guns till every spar had gone by the board, and only surrendered long after nightfall, when she was reduced to the condition of a mere shot-torn hulk.

Berry had now practically reached the climax of his career. He hoisted his flag on board a famous ship, the Agamemnon, but he did nothing famous in it. When he was Nelson's flag-captain, and under the spell of Nelson's companionship, he was capable of great things; but when left to himself he somehow seemed to lose all his initiative and more than half his daring. He took part in the great fight of Trafalgar, and it might have been expected that so illustrious a ship as the Agamemnon, under Nelson's favourite captain, would have filled a great place in that greatest of sea battles. This, however, was by no means the case.

On the morning when the combined fleet of the enemy came out of Cadiz the Agamemnon had captured a stumpy and heavyladen merchant brig, had its prize in tow, and was deliberately tugging it into the outstretched arms of the enemy's fleet! Blackwood, in the Euryalus, signalled that the enemy was in the north-east, but had to keep firing signal guns for an hour before the stolid Agamemnon took any notice. Blackwood's log runs: 'Made telegraph signals to the Agamemnon that thirty-four of the enemy were out, and to make all sail, and repeat signals between me and the admiral; and that the enemy's ships were much scattered; and directed Sir Edward Berry to fire every ten minutes with the preceding signal; but she still stood on southeast with a brig in tow, when we lost sight of her.' Berry, that is, was deliberately ignoring signals, and sailing away from the enemy. The Agamemnon resembled an ant that had captured

a beetle, and was dragging its booty, now in one direction and now in another, but determined not to give it up. It was not going to part with its precious beetle for any earthly consideration.

To the great fight itself the Agamemnon made an absolutely microscopic contribution. The most expressive sentence in the Agamemnon's own log of the battle consists in the words 'engaging the enemy's ships as most convenient.' The killed and wounded on the British side amounted to 1,690; to that total the Agamemnon contributed exactly ten. Only one other ship in the British fleet-the Polyphemus-reported fewer casualties than the Agamemnon: it had six killed and wounded. Now, a British 74 that went through the fires of Trafalgar and had only ten of its crew hit must either have been very unfortunately placed or very inefficiently handled. If Nelson had been on the quarter-deck of the Agamemnon, with Berry as his flag-captain, it may be assumed with entire certainty that the record would have been very different.

Nelson, in a word, was the head, Berry the hand. And Berry without Nelson was a hand without a brain to direct it.

When, for example, the message came that the Guillaume Tell had broken out of Malta, and that the tiny Penelope was in pursuit the flash of her guns visible in the darkness, but growing fainter every moment-Berry could not realise the situation, nor decide what to do. His angry commodore had to send a hurried and vehement message expressing his great surprise at the inactivity of the flagship of Lord Nelson' and his most positive orders' to slip her anchor and go in pursuit of the big Frenchman before Berry stirred. When somebody else told him what to do, then, indeed, Berry did it; and if it was, as in this case, to fight a visible Frenchman, he did it with energy and enjoyment. But he was slow-minded. A problem suddenly presented, unless somebody was on hand to interpret it, puzzled, or even paralysed, him. And war is made up of unexpected problems.

Codrington, it will be remembered, went into the fight at Trafalgar with a fine coolness. Not a gun was fired on board the Orion till its particular antagonist was chosen, and the Orion was almost touching its stern. Then one close and dreadful broadside sent the Frenchman's three masts tumbling and drove her to strike. But as the Orion, in disciplined and dreadful silence, moved slowly into the heart of the fight, Codrington gives us a glimpse of the Agamemnon far astern of us, blazing away

and wasting her ammunition!' That hasty, ineffective fire, planless and blind, gives the measure of Berry's leadership.

Berry was made a baronet; he commanded one of the royal yachts; he attained the rank of rear-admiral; he acquired, that is, a number of ornamental dignities, but he somehow lost both his professional efficiency and his fighting energy. He lived till 1831, but he outlived his faculties. He left no children. His baronetcy became extinct. Berry's career is thus a sort of unfulfilled prophecy. The man who at thirty years of age was the flag-captain of Nelson at the Nile, with seventeen years of war before him, ought to have left an imperishable mark upon history.

Berry's career is a torso, because he himself lacked the qualities, not merely of a great, but even of a second-class leader. He does not stand in the same rank with Troubridge, or Saumarez, or Ball. He had merely what may be called the ruder and more primitive qualities of the fighting man: indifference to danger, a joy in the rough and tumble of conflict, a fiery energy in merely physical strife. He was to Nelson what a cutlass is to a boarder a weapon caught up at the moment of combat, and valued for its power to slay. If Berry was as brave as his own sword, he was, as far as the higher qualities of leadership were concerned, as unintellectual as a sword.

613

'CAST.'" 1

BY HUGH CLIFFORD, C.M.G.

I.

THE recollection of my earliest impressions concerning him is still fresh in my mind. From the moment of our entry into the troubled land one name-the name of Simon Strange, of Tûan Streng,' as the natives called him--had been dinned into our ears with insistent reiteration. We were bored to death by the constant repetition. There seemed to be, in all that wilderness, no soul capable of framing a single sentence in which reference to Simon Strange did not occupy a place. The Chiefs who paid us courtly visits of ceremony to assure us of their loyalty to the alien Power for which we stood-a 'loyalty,' by the way, which was something curiously like treachery to their own people, and which even the simplest-hearted among us viewed with acute suspicion-invariably introduced themselves as being numbered in the tale of those whom 'Tûan Streng' valued and trusted and loved. This bare and unsupported statement was evidently regarded by them as an all-sufficing certificate of character, and as a sure key to our own respect, confidence, and affection.

At those excruciating interviews to which we were subjected by these local potentates, we groaned in spirit whenever Simon Strange, his opinions, customs, predilections, actions, words were quoted to us by our visitors. The Chiefs would sit glaring at us in funereal silence for hours at a time, occasionally punctuating the long embarrassing pauses by slow trickles of speech. They emitted their words as grudgingly as drops of water are squeezed from a dry sponge, but as surely as they found voice to speak so surely did they harp upon the one inevitable topic-Tûan Streng. The village headmen who wandered into camp with long tangled tales upon their lips-the hopeless irrelevancies and the panic-born rumours which these worthy folk dignified by the name of ' information'—always called loudly upon Tûan Streng' and upon Allah and His Prophet to witness that they did not lie, and wound up their most palpably incredible statements by declaring roundly

1 Copyright, 1902, by Hugh Clifford, in the United States of America.

that if only one or another of the above-mentioned authorities were in camp their precious news would find instant belief.

All the brown men, women, and children, who straggled in to us from the mysterious unknown forest country that girt us about, began by asking whether 'Tûan Streng' was with us, and expressed their disappointment with undisguised and unflattering frankness when they learned that they were expected to have dealings with our own unworthy selves. Not a few of them, when the absence of the popular hero was made known, declined absolutely to hold any intercourse with meaner folk than he, and retired incontinently into the wilderness which had spewed them forth. One hoary old ruffian, who had as his 'tail' a following of some of the most sinister-looking and elaborately armed cut-throats that I had ever seen, spat on the ground in the most unblushing fashion in token of his disgust when it was suggested to him that he should transfer his allegiance to us as the friends of the absentee. That was not to be thought of, he said. He and 'Tûan Streng' were brothers dunia akhirat—through time and eternity—a relationship which, I confess, did not move me to envy the unknown Strange. The old fellow also mentioned that his brother' was not a mere common white man, but a person of distinction, who, moreover, stood possessed of various useful and unusual qualities entitling him to honour. For instance, he was invulnerable, could foretell events, and was in close league with the Hantu Utanthe Jungle Demon-a serviceable spirit, it would appear, by whose aid Strange was reputed to be able to cover vast distances on foot in inconceivably short spaces of time. Viewed as samples of local superstition these fragments of modern folk-lore might have a certain interest, but long ere this I, and the other youngsters with the punitive expedition, had learned to cherish a deadly hatred of Simon Strange, the man whom none of us had ever met, from out the shadow of whose haunting personality it yet seemed impossible to emerge.

And the thing that irked us most was that the leaders of our expedition appeared to have become the thralls of the prevailing possession. It had been understood amongst us that we had been hurried up into the district in which we then lay in order to relieve Strange's stockade, where, with a couple of white men and a handful of Indian soldiers, he had been offering a stubborn resistance to certain hostile tribes who had maintained a close investment of the position during several precarious weeks. Why