The navy had need of that kind of recruits, and the King saw to it that he was apprenticed at once.  And that was the beginning of his strangely romantic career.

Three years he sailed before the mast and learned seamanship, while Charles was baiting the Muscovite and the North was resting on its arms.  Then came Pultava and the Swedish King’s crushing defeat.  The storm-centre was transferred to the North again, and the war on the sea opened with a splendid deed, fit to appeal to any ardent young heart.  At the battle in the Bay of Kjoege, the Dannebrog, commanded by Ivar Hvitfeldt, caught fire, and by its position exposed the Danish fleet to great danger.  Hvitfeldt could do one of two things:  save his own life and his men’s by letting his ship drift before the wind and by his escape risking the rest of the fleet and losing the battle, or stay where he was to meet certain death.  He chose the latter, anchored his vessel securely, and fought on until the ship was burned down to the water’s edge and blew up with him and his five hundred men.  Ivar Hvitfeldt’s name is forever immortal in the history of his country.  A few years ago they raised the wreck of the Dannebrog, fitly called after the Danish flag, and made of its guns a monument that stands on Langelinie, the beautiful shore road of Copenhagen.

Fired by such deeds, young Wessel implored the King, before he had yet worn out his first midshipman’s jacket, to give him command of a frigate.  He compromised on a small privateer, the Ormen, but with it he did such execution in Swedish waters and earned such renown as a dauntless sailor and a bold scout whose information about the enemy was always first and best, that before spring they gave him a frigate with eighteen guns and the emphatic warning “not to engage any enemy when he was not clearly the stronger.”  He immediately brought in a Swedish cruiser, the Alabama of those days, that had been the terror of the sea.  In a naval battle in the Baltic soon after, he engaged with his little frigate two of the enemy’s line-of-battle ships that were trying to get away, and only when a third came to help them did he retreat, so battered that he had to seek port to make repairs.  Accused of violating his orders, his answer was prompt:  “I promised your Majesty to do my best, and I did.”  King Frederik IV, himself a young and spirited man, made him a captain, jumping him over fifty odd older lieutenants, and gave him leave to war on the enemy as he saw fit.

The immediate result was that the Governor of Goeteborg, the enemy’s chief seaport in the North Sea, put a price on his head.  Captain Wessel heard of it and sent word into town that he was outside—­to come and take him; but to hurry, for time was short.  While waiting for a reply, he fell in with two Swedish men-of-war having in tow a Danish prize.  That was not to be borne, and though they together mounted ninety-four guns to his eighteen, he fell upon them like a thunderbolt.  They beat him off, but he returned for their prize.  That time they nearly sank him with three broad-sides.  However, he ran for the Norwegian coast and saved his ship.  In his report of this affair he excuses himself for running away with the reflection that allowing himself to be sunk “would not rightly have benefited his Majesty’s service.”