Commodore Sir Frederick Collier was good enough to have these rafts experimented with at my request.  I turned my opportunity of seeing them to good account.  When I was back in Paris, some two or three months later, the English naval captain (his name escapes me, I fancy it was Smith), who had invented this raft system, asked me to receive him.  He came, so he told me, to offer his plan to the French navy, and on the strength of the interest with which I had followed the trial of his boat at Woolwich, he begged me to recommend it to the minister for that department of affairs.  Further, he offered to bring me a model of it.

“Wait one moment,” I replied.

I rang the bell, and sent for an old workman who was in my employment.  He came, with a model of my visitor’s boat and lowering apparatus in his hand, constructed on drawings I had made on my return from England.  The inventor stood as though petrified at the sight.  The only word he said was “Wonderful!” It appears I had caught the likeness at once.  What it is to know how to draw!

Let me add, by the way, that the old workman to whom I have just referred had been a ship’s carpenter with the fleet commanded by Villaret de Joyeuse in the naval engagement which we call the Battle of the 13th Prairial, and the English that of the 1st of June.  At my house he often met an academician, as old as himself, of the name of Dupaty, who had also been a sailor, and present at the same battle.  The two old warriors would interchange recollections, which amused me much, and often interested me deeply as well.

From them I learnt that before the fleet sailed from Brest to fight the British it was “purified” (epuree).  The captain and two lieutenants of the flag-ship, the Cote d’Or, were guillotined, and the ship’s name changed into the terrifying one of the Montagne.  The captain of another ship, the Jean Bart, had also been beheaded.  Thousands of sailors and seasoned marines, whose opinions were not trusted, were drafted into the land-forces, and replaced by others who were pure Republicans, but who did not know their work.  Pour encourager les AUTRES, Jean Bon St. Andre, commissary of the republic with the fleet, and afterwards prefect of Mayence under Napoleon (his very name marked him out for the post!), had caused a guillotine to be erected on board every ship.  It was set up forward at the foot of the foremast.  Yet all these terrorising measures and this revolutionary disorganisation did not bring us victory.  They brought indeed nothing but defeat, attended by downright carnage.  The valour of our crews often amounted to actual heroism.  But they had no skill.  They were killed, but they could not deal death themselves.  Every English shot told.  Every French one flew wide.  It is most distressing, on consulting the annals of the two navies, to notice the enormous losses on board the French ships compared with the insignificant number of men killed or wounded on the English ones.  True it is, that at sea, just as on dry land, extemporised arrangements are disastrous things, and that, as I have already asserted, nothing can ever replace professional skill and the long established habit of obedience to superior orders and general discipline.