Poor Jack   By: Frederick Marryat (1792-1848)

Captain Frederick Marryat was born July 10 1792, and died August 8 1848. He retired from the British navy in 1828 in order to devote himself to writing. In the following 20 years he wrote 26 books, many of which are among the very best of English literature, and some of which are still in print.

Marryat had an extraordinary gift for the invention of episodes in his stories. He says somewhere that when he sat down for the day's work, he never knew what he was going to write. He certainly was a literary genius.

"Poor Jack" was published in 1840, the sixteenth book to flow from Marryat's pen. It is principally set on the banks of the River Thames, as it flows through London, in particular at Greenwich. Many of the landmarks described still exist, though their use may have changed in two centuries! Like "Jacob Faithful", which also takes place to a large extent, though in a different manner, on the London River Thames, the descriptions of the working of lighters, wherries, and other light boats, is especially interesting.

This e text was transcribed in 1998 by Nick Hodson, and was reformatted in 2003, and again in 2005.

POOR JACK, BY CAPTAIN FREDERICK MARRYAT.

CHAPTER ONE.

IN WHICH, LIKE MOST PEOPLE WHO TELL THEIR OWN STORIES, I BEGIN WITH THE HISTORIES OF OTHER PEOPLE.

I have every reason to believe that I was born in the year of our Lord 1786, for more than once I put the question to my father, and he invariably made the same reply: "Why, Jack, you were launched a few months before the Druids were turned over to the Melpomene." I have since ascertained that this remarkable event occurred in January 1787. But my father always reckoned in this way: if you asked him when such an event took place, he would reply, so many years or months after such a naval engagement or remarkable occurrence; as, for instance, when I one day inquired how many years he had served the King, he responded, "I came into the sarvice a little afore the battle of Bunker's Hill, in which we licked the Americans clean out of Boston." [I have since heard a different version of the result of this battle.] As for Anno Domini, he had no notion of it whatever.

Who my grandfather was, I cannot inform the reader, nor is it, perhaps, of much consequence. My father was a man who invariably looked forward, and hated anything like retrospection: he never mentioned either his father or his mother; perhaps he was not personally acquainted with them. All I could collect from him at intervals was, that he served in a collier from South Shields, and that a few months after his apprenticeship was out, he found himself one fine morning on board of a man of war, having been picked up in a state of unconsciousness, and hoisted up the side without his knowledge or consent. Some people may infer from this, that he was at the time tipsy; he never told me so; all he said was, "Why, Jack, the fact is when they picked me up I was quite altogether non pompus ." I also collected at various times the following facts, that he was put into the mizen top, and served three years in the West Indies; that he was transferred to the main top, and served five years in the Mediterranean; that he was made captain of the foretop, and sailed six years in the East Indies; and, at last, was rated captain's coxswain in the Druid frigate, attached to the Channel fleet cruising during the peace. Having thus condensed the genealogical and chronological part of this history, I now come to a portion of it in which it will be necessary that I should enter more into detail.