George Alfred Henty: The Story of an Active Life

Chapter Forty Three.
His Great Hobby

Probably Henty never so much enjoyed release from his workshop study as when he could get on board his yacht, the Egret. He was especially fond of this boat, which was really a most comfortable vessel, not built upon racing lines, but somewhat reminding one of the small cruising schooners which were fashionable at Cowes in the sixties and early seventies.

He had an honest, plain-spoken skipper and crew, who knew their business thoroughly, and they evidently looked upon the owner as more of a friend than a captain. One of his favourite cruising-grounds was the estuary of the Thames. The yacht would sometimes lie off Leigh, and sometimes up the Medway. The locality is not one which many other yachtsmen would choose, for there are shoals and tidal eccentricities that require a watchful eye. Owner and skipper, however, knew every inch of that broad waterway.

Henty’s cabin lay aft, and was well lighted from the deck. It was thoroughly roomy, and by an ingenious contrivance the luxury of a bath could at any time be indulged in, through merely lifting a panel from the floor.

To see Henty at his most peaceful stage was to watch him lying back high upon the pillows on the deck of his yacht reading some favourite author. This would generally be an old friend, for like many another, he was fond of renewing his acquaintance with writers who had attracted him in the years gone by.

The galley was in charge of a good substantial sea cook, who could turn out a plain meal that was sufficient for any reasonable man’s wants, though it need not be explained in detail that in the appointments of the state rooms and main cabin table there was no affectation of luxury. The yacht would be always well provisioned with joints that not only admitted, but invited a cut-and-come-again principle.

Of course, everybody who knew Henty could, all his life through, testify to his perfect abstemiousness. In fact, one has known many instances in which the serious warning spoken by Henty to young colleagues, who were with him on journalistic expeditions, saved them from much mischief. He would deliver his little lecture on a weakness which he had noticed, and invariably finish with, “Pardon me for being so free, old chap, but if you take my advice you will watch it.”

Except when he went across the North Sea, the yachting cruises were of fairly long week-end duration, but sooner or later the yacht would be passing in review whatever naval operations were on the way at Sheerness, while a favourite mooring for the night was up towards Chatham at a spot where there was a wood on the northern bank.

Henty always seemed to the manner born when on board his yacht, and an early cup of coffee, in pyjamas on deck, sometimes not a great while after sunrise, was invariably indulged in. This was followed, of course, by the faithful pipe, which, indeed, was in constant action from morning to night.

He was a man who used to attribute his good health and spirits as much to his yacht as to anything in the world, and more than once his friends, in commenting upon his love for the sea, have declared that no better representative of the old sea kings of England could have been seen afloat than George Alfred Henty. No one really saw him at his best who did not see him in rough weather, bare-headed, with the wind whistling through his grey hair, and the foam torn from the waves bedewing his big beard and making his sun-tanned, bronzed visage glisten, as he stood at the wheel, firm of aspect, gazing defiantly before him in a kind of rapture, and thoroughly enjoying life the while he ploughed the waves. If any endorsement of this were needed by the reader who never met the subject face to face, let him turn to the photograph showing Henty reading the proofs of his last book aboard his yacht. The portrait was taken not long before his death, and gives a far better idea to the reader of the big, bluff, sturdy war correspondent than would pages of writing.

For he was born to be a sailor, and the wonder is that he did not develop into being the captain of some great liner, instead of a wielder of the pen. One striking phase in his character that was developed in his yachting pursuits was that, though he thoroughly enjoyed inviting and having the company of some old friend on board, to whom he was the most genial and hospitable of hosts, he was yet perfectly happy when alone with his crew. At such times he would carry out various manoeuvres, and quite contentedly occupy himself with his own thoughts.

One man will make friend and companion of a faithful dog; another is never more content than when he is with his horse. To Henty, from quite early in life, his yacht took the place of some living sentient being – his yacht and its movement, whether driven forward under the pressure of a light breeze, or throbbing beneath his feet as it bounded and leaped from wave to wave in a gale. For he was no smooth-water sailor, but had grown into a hardened and masterly mariner, who thoroughly understood the varied caprices of the deep.

He would generally manage to be afloat somewhere about Easter, for a few days each week, cruising, as has been said, about the mouth of the Thames, and once in a way he would shoot across to Heligoland for the Emperor’s Cup race. He seldom studied much about the weather so long as he could be well afloat; though at times he would encounter a furious gale out in the open sea, and get what he himself termed a thorough good knocking about.

He related to a friend that upon one occasion he passed through a fearful gale, with the force of the wind so great that he and his crew ran two hundred and sixty knots in twenty-seven hours, putting in at Harwich without shipping a bucket of water in the run home.

One of Henty’s greatest regrets when the weather was fairly fine was that his literary avocations prevented him from being oftener afloat. This was especially the case at times when there was war or rumour of war, for then he would be on duty at the Standard waiting for the brief telegrams that came in at all hours from Reuter’s and elsewhere. These were brought to him, as before mentioned, to be expanded from their key-like brevity into plain straightforward reading for the printers to set up.

As already stated, in this favourite pursuit of yachting Henty heartily enjoyed the companionship of friends who liked the sea, but at the same time if men of similar tastes did not present themselves, he was well content to be alone. A thoroughly social man, he had his own strong ideas upon companionship. He set limits to such a means of enjoyment, and he could speak out very strongly against excursion trips in which he was asked to take part. “I like to see things,” he said. “I like to go into the country on a little trip to see some object of interest, or to pay a visit to some historic town, but I don’t like these excursion trips, and I won’t go!” Alluding to the parties of “trippers” so numerous in summer weather, who make our railway stations unpleasant for those who wish to travel, he denounced them in the most forcible way. “I like to go,” he said, “with a few fellows in a friendly way. What I object to is going in a mob.” In plain English, it touched Henty’s pride to visit some excursionist haunt where he felt that his party would be classed as bean-feasters, or what is known as the members of a wayzgoose, and he resented the whole position as unworthy of the dignity of a literary man.

Henty’s love of yachting began early in life, when he was holding a commission in the army and stationed at Kingstown, where he owned a ten-tonner called The Pet. It was his first craft, and very nearly proved to be his last, for upon one occasion he had been out sailing with his little crew for some distance, and had the misfortune to be caught in a heavy gale, which gave him and his men a very severe lesson in seamanship. There was a tremendous sea, and before they were able to make the harbour, and anchor, their position was so perilous that a huge crowd collected, in momentary expectation of seeing the yacht go down, for it was impossible for her crew to land.

To make matters worse, and to add to the excitement, the officer’s young wife was one of those who joined the crowd, and she kept appealing in her agony of mind to the seagoing men around to save her husband’s life. Finally a boat was manned by a sturdy party, and with great difficulty the little crew were brought ashore in safety. This was early in the sixties, and after that, enthusiastic yachtsman though he was, his avocations and absence from England put a stop to his seagoing till about 1887, when, opportunity serving, he bought an old life-boat and converted her into a yacht. The buoyancy of her build attracted him, and for some years this little thirteen-ton vessel, the Kittiwake as he called her (and well did she deserve her name), afforded him a long series of pleasant runs.

But previous to owning the Kittiwake Henty became possessed of a small half-decked canoe, which afforded him an opportunity of bringing to bear that inventive genius which at different periods of his career had induced him to try his hand at various contrivances, any one of which might have brought him fame and fortune such as came to a fellow-member of his club in connection with a torpedo that was taken over by the British government. At one time he constructed a spar torpedo. This was during the American Civil War, and upon its completion he offered it to the United States authorities. Another of his ideas, also of a warlike character, was an invention the necessity of which he had probably seen practically demonstrated. This was a contrivance for the practice of long-range firing where opportunity did not serve, that is to say, in a limited space of ground. By means of Henty’s arrangement, practice up to a thousand or twelve hundred yards range could be indulged in, though only eighty to a hundred yards were available. When finished, he offered the result to our own War Office, but, strange to relate, this outcome of long and careful thought was allowed to join the limbo of thousands of other inventions, good, bad, and indifferent, for it was not accepted. He laid no more of his ideas before boards for consideration, but after this devoted himself to his half-decked canoe, which was tinkered and altered about in a pursuit which always afforded him intense gratification. It filled a gap while he was waiting, and toiling hard, to place himself in a position in which he could, without pinching, purchase for himself an Egret– a yacht which he could enter for an emperor’s cup. Journalists who marry, and have sons to push forward in the world, and who also have to meet ordinary expenses, have not much money to waste, even if they are successful war correspondents. Henty’s yachting desires, therefore, for a long time were not wholly gratified, and he had to occupy himself with the pen, which industriously built up the long series of books that made his name so well known to the rising generation. Nevertheless his yachting moved by degrees, and he gave full vent to his inventive powers with this little half-decked canoe. First, after much study, he lengthened her, to find most probably that she was now what a sailor would call “crank.” To meet this difficulty, he took a lesson from the naïve and clever notions of the canoe-sailers of the South Seas, and fitted on outriggers with gratings on the outrigger spars. His boat was then a great success when used for sailing about the mouth of the Thames, for the scheme answered admirably, and he was very proud of offering a sail therein to a friend or brother journalist or editor. Still not content with his conversion, and doubtless incited thereto by the leeway his little craft made, he added to it what is known amongst boating men as a centre-board – a very unusual addition this to a canoe – namely, a deep keel, which acted after the fashion of the lee-boards of a Thames barge.

His ambition growing, he next bought the Dream, a thirty-two ton yawl. But Henty was no dreamer, and he changed her name to the Meerschaum, not after his pipe, but because of his love of sending her careening over and through the sea foam.

The Meerschaum only satisfied his desires, though, for about three years, when he purchased a vessel better worthy of his attention as an enthusiastic yachtsman, in the shape of the before-mentioned Egret, an eighty-three ton schooner. This boat he sailed with a skilful crew for years, indulging now and then in a handicap in the Corinthian or the Thames Yacht Club, of both of which, as well as of the Medway Club, he was a member.

He had various cups to show as the reward of his prowess. One of these, a handsome trophy, of which he was very proud, he would display to his friends with sparkling eyes, though the modest nature of the man stepped in at once as he hastened to say, “That was won by my men of the Egret at Cowes. They had the money prize, and out of it purchased this cup for me,” – a little fact this which clearly showed the friendly feeling existing between skipper and crew. The ambition to win what would be looked upon as a greater prize was shown more than once in his crossing the North Sea to enter the lists for the German Emperor’s Cup. On one occasion so brave a fight was made that the Egret would have proved the winner had not fate been against her; she was ready to battle with the sea no matter how rough, but was helpless when the wind failed, and this was what happened, to her owner’s intense disappointment.

A propos of prize cups, the sideboard in Henty’s museum-like study had a pretty good display of silver trophies, many of which were the prizes won during the time when he was a member of the London Rowing Club, where his broad, deep chest, heavy muscles, long reach, and powers of endurance made him a formidable competitor. And it was in this club, oddly enough, that he first made the acquaintance of Mr J.P. Griffith, who, being a very rapid scribe, became the amanuensis and writer to whom he dictated every one of the books which, calf bound, all en suite, made such an imposing show on the shelves of one large book-case.

In the summer of 1897, the Diamond Jubilee year, it fell to Henty’s lot to describe for the Standard the passing of the procession along the Piccadilly portion of the route, while a fellow correspondent for the Standard, Mr Bloundelle Burton, described the Queen’s journey along the Strand. This gentleman in the same year was acting as correspondent on board one of our battleships at the Naval Review off Portsmouth, and Henty, taking advantage of his position as a yacht owner, stationed the Egret off the Isle of Wight, and there in hospitable fashion kept “open house” for his friends.

He took a very keen and wholly natural pride in this graceful yacht, the Egret, perhaps because in acquiring her he pretty well reached the height of his ambition. He liked to talk about her prowess in sailing, which he modestly veiled by setting it down to the skill of his men. But his pride in the Egret when she walked the waters like a thing of life, shone out of his eyes, and he did what he could to make her fame lasting by having her photographed. The accompanying admirable representation, which was taken for him by Messrs Kirk and Son, of Cowes, shows the little yacht running free before a brisk breeze off the coast of the Isle of Wight.

Chapter Forty Four.
A Final Word

In all probability the portrait of George Alfred Henty, which shows him on his yacht, was the last that was taken prior to his death. It is certainly Henty as we know him, and it shows him in his most natural aspect, for it was taken when he was not merely in the full enjoyment of his favourite pastime, but combining it with his work. It represents him unexpectant, grave, and intent, reading over and making corrections in the proof-sheets of one of his last books. Being a genuine snap-shot, nothing possibly could have been more happy, and it certainly deserves to be termed a perfectly natural untouched likeness. The taking of this photograph came about almost by accident. Just before his last cruise, Henty wished to have some alterations made in the sails of the Egret. A local sail-maker – a Mr Ainger – came on board to carry out the task, and he chanced to have brought his camera. Seizing an opportune moment, he took the portrait, with the accompanying excellent result, and in sending it to the writer Captain C.G. Henty adds these words, “It seems to me singularly characteristic,” – a comment that everyone who is well acquainted with the subject must feel bound to endorse.

Captain Henty goes on to state: “For some years before his death my father suffered from gouty diabetes. In the autumn of 1902 he complained of feeling very unwell, and, although he had laid up the Egret, he got her into commission again. After a short cruise, however, he returned, and finally brought the schooner to an anchor in Weymouth Harbour, and from there he never moved again.

“On Saturday morning, the first of November, he was stricken with paralysis, but after a few days he showed signs of recovering the vigorous health which he had enjoyed almost throughout his life. His great powers of recuperation stood him in good stead, and he steadily improved to such an extent that hopes were entertained of his being brought up to town. Exactly a fortnight, though, after the first seizure he was attacked by bronchitis, and on Sunday morning, the sixteenth of the month, he passed quietly away.”

He was laid to rest in Brompton Cemetery, in the same grave as his first wife and his two daughters.

Heading a long article descriptive of his career, the Standard, the journal with which he had been intimately connected since the year 1865, says in reference to his passing: “We regret to announce the death of Mr G.A. Henty, which occurred yesterday on his yacht at Weymouth. He had been in weak health for some time, but almost to the last he retained his capacity for work.”