d
itself at once in the renewed activity and intelligent direction of
effort, on the decks and on the beach. The degree of the danger can be
estimated from the fact that boats from the ships of war in port, his
own included, tried in vain to approach and had to run for safety to the
inner harbor. With sword drawn,--for many of the soldiers were drunk and
riotous,--Pellew maintained order, guided with a seaman's readiness the
preparations for landing, and saw the women, the children,--one child
but three weeks old,--the sick, landed first, then the soldiers, lastly
the seamen. When he himself was transferred to the beach by the same
means that his skill had contrived for others, but three persons
remained on board, officers of the ship, who eased him on shore. The
injuries he had received in his perilous passage out, and which confined
him to his bed for a week, forbade his being last. To the end of his
life, this saving of the crew of the _Dutton_ was the action in which he
took most pride.

The year that opened with this magnificent act of self-devotion saw
Pellew, at its close, bearing a seaman's part in the most serious crisis
that befell his country during the wars of the French Revolution. The
end of 1796 and the earlier months of 1797 marked the nadir of Great
Britain's military fortunes. The successes of Bonaparte's Italian
campaign were then culminating; Austria was on the point of making peace
with France; England was about to find herself alone, and the discontent
of the seamen of the navy, long smouldering, was soon to break out into
the famous and threatening mutinies of the Channel Fleet and of the
Nore. At the same time France, relieved on her eastern frontiers, felt
able to devote seventeen ships-of-the-line and eighteen thousand troops
to the invasion of Ireland.

Pellew, with two frigates besides his own, was stationed off the mouth
of Brest harbor to watch the enemy's movements; the main British fleet
being some fifty miles to seaward. To this emergency he brought not only
the intrepidity of a great seaman and the ardor of an anxious patriot,
but likewise the intense though narrow Protestant feeling transmitted
from a past, then not so remote, when Romanism and enmity to England
were almost synonymous. "How would you like," said he to an officer who
shared Pitt's liberal tendencies, "to see Roman Catholic chaplains on
board our ships?" and to the end of his life he opposed the political
enfranchiseme