broke over her.  Pellew was at this moment driving to a dinner with his wife.  Seeing crowds running from various directions towards the same quarter, he asked the reason.  Upon learning it, he left his carriage and hurried to the scene.  When he arrived, he recognized, by the confusion on board, by the way the ship was laboring, by the poverty of the means that had been contrived for landing the imperilled souls,—­only a single hawser having been run to the shore,—­that the loss of nearly all on board was imminent.  Night, too, was falling, as well as the destruction of the vessel impending.  After vainly offering rewards to the hardy boatmen standing by, if they would board the wreck with a message from him, he said, “Then I must go myself.”  Though then close to forty years of age, his immense personal strength and activity enabled him, though sorely bruised thereby, to be hauled on board through the breakers by the hawser, which alternately slacked and then tightened with a jerk as the doomed ship rolled to and fro in the seas.  Once on board, he assumed command, the want of which, through the absence of the proper captain, had until then hampered and well-nigh paralyzed all effectual effort.  When his well-known name was spoken, three hearty cheers arose from the troops on board, echoed by the thousands of spectators on shore; and the hope that revived with the presence of a born leader of men showed 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.