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The Battle of Trafalgar
(Edison)
By EDWIN M. LA ROCHE*
What my affair was in Binstead, that decrepit fishing village in the Isle of Wight, was of but passing moment. It was many years ago. I have but misty recollections of its gravelly beach, its nets and trawls, the dim look of the low-lying shores beyond and the ceaseless shipping in the Spithead. The world of men and ships had passed it by for countless ages; yet, they said, Binstead had its gayer seasons, too— a time when city people descended upon them and the sands became a promenade of puissant fashion.
It was my fortune to dwell in Binstead out of season, as it were, for otherwise I had never gotten beyond the portals of Binstead formality. I was viewed as neither a successor of the past season nor as a forerunner of the coming. My lodgings, and, let me hope, humble demeanor, were unanticipated and unclassed as part of the summer show.
Now, altho I am sorely tempted to dwell out over again the pleasant, cozy days of Binstead, and pictures of its fisher folk are, like faded ambrotypes, ever forming shadowy visions in my reaching mind, I have set me down to unwind a bolder tale, encompassing the seven seas. And were I able as my spokesman — a voice of past men — I would give it you from its genesis — the crystal solitude of polar nights, the foetid luxury of tropic days, schemes and intrigue with the wily Genoese, the beginnings of a great love, the ending of a great Spanish fleet; these and more too would I serve eagerly. But I fear me that as the fresh levanters of the sea
are depressed by their passage thru a city so the tale is dulled in my retelling.
As the slanting sun washed the Binstead wharf in its' soft light, and the fishing fleet worked in, with the day's catch, on the dying breeze, the venerable post-captain was accustomed to appear in rusty naval blue and to tread the masonry with the gait and appearance of one upon a quarterdeck. With wide sweeps each homing sail was picked up by his peering glass and held in shaking focus till its identity was plain. Uncloyed pleasure the ancient seemed to have from these repeated antics, a washtub sea with mimic craft to spy upon.
By some strange far-sightedness he must have kenned me, a rudderless pleasure barque — for I, too, frequented the wharf — and, without coming under the actual aim of his glass, I became a fixed object of his solicitude, always in the tail of his curious blue eyes. Binstead folk held him in great, tho uncommunicative, veneration— a hale and active relic of great sea days that had gone. On inquiry, I found that he had come among them years agone like some figurehead of a ship-of-the-line washed upon the sands.
By sheer stress of propinquity, mayhap a something of mutual sympathy too, we wharfingers — the aged mariner and I — became acquainted. When, in the course of time, I had unbosomed my ill adventures in the love mart to him, he, in turn, patiently unfolded horizon by horizon his broad life on the seas, less trite than
*The author refers to the following books for confirmation of historical data: "Life of Nelson," by Captain A. T. Mahan ; "Great Campaigns of Nelson," by William O'C. Morris; "Life of Nelson," by Robert Southey; "Public and Private Life of Horatio Viscount Nelson," by G. L. Brown.
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