such antecedents contributed of course to hasten the young officer’s advancement, irrespective of the unquestionable professional merit shown by him, even in early years; but to them also, combined with narrow personal fortune, inadequate to the tastes thus engendered, was probably due the pecuniary embarrassment which dogged him through life, and was perhaps the moving incentive to doubtful procedures that cast a cloud upon his personal and official reputation.

Rodney was born in February, 1719, and went to sea at the age of thirteen; serving for seven years in the Channel Fleet.  Thence he was transferred to the Mediterranean, where he was made lieutenant in 1739.  In 1742 he went again to the Mediterranean with Admiral Mathews, who there gave him command of a “post” ship, with which he brought home the trade,—­three hundred merchant vessels,—­from Lisbon.  Upon arriving in England his appointment by Mathews was “confirmed” by the Admiralty.  Being then only twenty-four, he anticipated by five years the age at which Hawke reached the same rank of post-captain, the attainment of which fixed a man’s standing in the navy.  Beyond that, advancement went by seniority; a post-captain might be “yellowed,”—­retired as a rear admiral,—­but while in active service he kept the advantage of his early promotion.

When Rodney was in later years commander-in-chief in the West Indies, he made his son a post-captain at fifteen; an exercise of official powers which, though not singular to him, is too characteristic of the man and the times to be wholly unmentioned.  His own promotion, though rapid, was not too much so for his professional good; but it is likely that neither that consideration, nor the good of the service, counted for much alongside of the influence he possessed.  He appears, however, to have justified from the first the favor of his superiors.  His employment was continuous, and in a military point of view he was more fortunate than Hawke was at the same period of his career.  Within two years, when in command of a forty-gun ship, he fought and took a French privateer of the same nominal force, and with a crew larger by one hundred than his own.  Thence he was advanced into the Eagle, sixty, in which, after some commerce-destroying more lucrative than glorious, he bore an extremely honorable part in Hawke’s battle with L’Etenduere, already related.  The Eagle was heavily engaged, and was one of the three small ships that on their own initiative pursued and fought, though unsuccessfully, the two escaping French vessels.  Rodney shared Hawke’s general encomium, that “as far as fell within my notice, the commanders, their officers, and ships’ companies, behaved with the greatest spirit and resolution.”  Rodney came under his close observation, for, the Eagle’s “wheel being shot to pieces and all the men at it killed, and all her braces and bowlines gone,” she drove twice on board the flag-ship.  This was before her pursuit of the two fliers.