Men of War: The Changing Face of Heroism in the 19th Century Navy. David Crane

his character than was good for a junior officer. He had taken over HM Survey Vessel Kangaroo in a murky Deptford Basin just five months earlier, and had brought to his first modest command all the enthusiasm and energy of a man who had lived for that responsibility since he had first gone to sea as an eleven-year-old on the eve of Trafalgar. ‘I was a young officer,’ he later pleaded in extenuation of his recklessness,

      and anxious to excel … God forbid that I should for one instant attempt to justify in myself a conduct that I should not approve in another. I had quite recently observed with admiration the smart way in which some men of war in which I have been brought up have shortened all sail at the moment of anchoring and I was ambitious to imitate them. I feel now how injudicious it was to attempt such an evolution in a vessel like the Kangaroo.

      Contrition did not come naturally to Frank Hastings, but more unfortunately it had not come early either, and long before this confession reached the Admiralty he had done all within his powers to ruin his career. On the evening of the Kangaroo’s arrival in Port Royal he had delivered the despatches he was carrying to the Commander-in-Chief as if nothing untoward had happened, and then like Achilles to his tent, had returned to the pregnant solitude of his captain’s cabin to brood over the public nature of Parker’s insult. ‘When duty permitted me for a moment to reflect on the language used by Captain Parker,’ he later wrote to the Lords Commissioners,

      my first impression was to apply for a Court martial … there were officers of the army on board who could not be ignorant from its Publicity of the insult offered me & … would have construed forbearance into cowardice … in fact the short time I had to deliberate left me no choice but that of disgracing the Rank to which your Lordships had been pleased to appoint me or of adopting the proceeding which has unfortunately led to this explanation.

      The following morning – a Sunday – he went on half-pay and, dressed in a plain blue greatcoat, had himself rowed across the harbour to Admiral Home Popham’s flagship. There, on the Iphigenia’s quarterdeck, ‘between three and four bells’, he approached the officer of the watch, a Lieutenant Wood. ‘Captain Hastings asked me if Captain Parker was on board,’ Wood later testified: ‘he at the same time gave me a note for Captain Parker saying it was from Captain Hastings. I went to the opposite side of the deck where Captain Parker was and delivered it to him, informing him it was from Captain Hastings. Captain Parker then opened the note and appeared to read it.’

      ‘Port Royal Monday 20th June,’ the hurriedly scribbled note read. ‘You appear about to sail – time is precious tomorrow morning I must have that satisfaction your conduct on the 18th has rendered so indispensable. I am not provided with a friend so that I am myself the bearer of this. Frank Hastings late commander of the Kangaroo.’

      It was the first in a chain of letters that would eventually stretch from Port Royal to the Admiralty and the Prince Regent. ‘Sir,’ Parker wrote the same day to Popham, enclosing Hastings’s challenge, careful to embrace his admiral, his admiral’s flagship and His Majesty’s whole navy in the insult to his personal dignity:

      The day before yesterday in the evening a Brig of War, the Kangaroo, commanded by Lieutenant Frank Hastings came into Port Royal, in so unofficerlike manner as far as related to the respect which is due to all Flag Ships, and in so lubberly as far as relates to his professional duties as a seaman … that I could not refrain from reprimanding the Officer, whoever he might be, in severe terms …

      To my great astonishment however, this morning a person calling himself Capt Frank Hastings came aboard His Majesty’s Ship Iphigenia and delivered the enclosed challenge …

      I now most respectfully Sir, leave it to you to judge whether the discipline of the Service has not been insulted by such a proceeding … I am satisfied that my Lords Commissioners of the Admiralty will upon this occasion approve of my conduct in bringing this Officer before a Court instead of accepting a challenge publicly delivered before the officers; contrary to the respect which is due to the Military discipline of His Majesty’s Service.

      As Popham’s own chequered record would suggest, he was in fact a seaman of a very different cast – had Hastings issued his challenge in the first rush of blood, he later told him, he ‘could almost have forgiven it the provocation was such’ – but in a service that forbade duelling he had little room for manoeuvre. On the same day he instructed Commodore Sir George Collier to convene the senior captains in port aboard HMS Sybille, and when in another fit of hauteur and legalistic quibbling Hastings refused to attend a court that could have no jurisdiction over an officer on half-pay, the slow, deliberate processes of Admiralty justice ground into motion without him.

      ‘Was the Commander in Chief’s Flag flying on board the Iphigenia at the time the Kangaroo anchored?’ Parker was asked on board the Sybille.

      ‘Yes.’

      ‘Did you consider the manner in which the Kangaroo came to an anchor Seaman-like or not?’ they asked Mr Rent, the Iphigenia’s master.

      ‘No – I could not avoid exclaiming – That’s a lubberly trick and that I thought the Flag Captain would give it him.’

      One by one – Flag Captain, Master of the Tartar , Master Mate of the Kangaroo, Master, First Lieutenant and Boatswain of the Iphigenia – they were all questioned, and when Lieutenant Hood reported that he had seen ‘Captain Hastings shake his head in, as it struck me, a very disrespectful manner’ at the retreating figure of Parker, the court’s findings became a formality. ‘10th Aug,’ John Wilson Croker – placeman supreme, model for the vile Rigby in Disraeli’s Coningsby, and Tory Secretary to the Admiralty – scrawled crossways over the Port Royal court findings:

      This is an aggravated case of insubordination. The Board are indispensably called upon to remove Captain Frank Hastings from the list of commissioned officers in the Navy. Acqt. Sir H. Popham accordingly, & inform him also that their Lds. entirely approve the conduct of Capt Parker in refraining from noticing the challenge conveyed to him by Mr Hastings in any other manner than by transmitting it to the Rear Admiral for his information, and they desire it to be understood that even if it should be repeated at any future period, the acceptance of it on the part of Captain Parker would in their Lds’ estimation be highly improper and would incur their severe displeasure.

      It was the end of Frank Hastings’s Royal Naval career.

      II

      If ever a man was doomed by birth it was Frank Abney Hastings. In the weeks and months after the Kangaroo incident, there was scarcely a day when one word of apology could not have saved his career, when a single gesture of moderation or even cautious self-interest could not have redeemed his reputation; but he was quite simply incapable of making it. ‘Your Lordship may find officers that will submit to such language,’ he wrote instead to Lord Melville, the First Lord of the Admiralty,

      but I don’t envy them their dear purchased rank & God forbid the British Navy should have no better supporters of its character than such contemptible creatures. A great stress has been layed upon the circumstance of the challenge being delivered to Capt Parker on the Quarter deck, but … why the contents of a sealed challenge should be known to bystanders any more than the contents of a dinner invitation I confess myself at a loss to divine.

      If this was hardly the language of conciliation or compromise, the truth was that there was nothing in Hastings’s temperament or background that would have counselled a place for either. For six hundred years the Hastings family had amassed titles and lands with a daring promiscuity, alternately the favourites and the victims of successive English monarchs to whom they were too closely related for comfort, safety or humility. ‘Though the noble Earl was sprung from ancestors the most noble that this Kingdom could boast,’ the Gentleman’s Magazine wrote in 1789 on the death of Frank’s grandfather, the 10th Earl of Huntingdon,

      Plantagenet, Hastings, Beauchamp, Neville, Stafford, Devereux, Pole, Stanley, it might be said also that they were most unfortunate. The Duke of Gloucester was strangled at Calais. The Duke of Clarence was put to death privately [fine word, ‘private’] in the Tower. The Countess of Salisbury, his