The Sea-Hawk | Page 4

how he permits his
lingering disapproval of the man to intrude upon his description of him.
The truth is that--as there is ample testimony in his prolific writings-- is
lordship was something of a misanthropist. It was, in fact, his
misanthropy which drove him, as it has driven many another, to
authorship. He takes up the pen, not so much that he may carry out his
professed object of writing a chronicle of his own time, but to the end
that he may vent the bitterness engendered in him by his fall from
favour. As a consequence he has little that is good to say of anyone,
and rarely mentions one of his contemporaries but to tap the sources of
a picturesque invective. After all, it is possible to make excuses for him.
He was at once a man of thought and a man of action--a combination as
rare as it is usually deplorable. The man of action in him might have
gone far had he not been ruined at the outset by the man of thought. A
magnificent seaman, he might have become Lord High Admiral of
England but for a certain proneness to intrigue. Fortunately for
him--since otherwise he could hardly have kept his head where nature
had placed it--he came betimes under a cloud of suspicion. His career
suffered a check; but it was necessary to afford him some compensation
since, after all, the suspicions could not be substantiated.
Consequently he was removed from his command and appointed by the
Queen's Grace her Lieutenant of Cornwall, a position in which it was
judged that he could do little mischief. There, soured by this blighting
of his ambitions, and living a life of comparative seclusion, he turned,
as so many other men similarly placed have turned, to seek consolation
in his pen. He wrote his singularly crabbed, narrow and superficial
History of Lord Henry Goade: his own Times--which is a miracle of
injuvenations, distortions, misrepresentations, and eccentric spelling. In

the eighteen enormous folio volumes, which he filled with his minute
and gothic characters, he gives his own version of the story of what he
terms his downfall, and, having, notwithstanding his prolixity,
exhausted this subject in the first five of the eighteen tomes, he
proceeds to deal with so much of the history of his own day as came
immediately under his notice in his Cornish retirement.
For the purposes of English history his chronicles are entirely
negligible, which is the reason why they have been allowed to remain
unpublished and in oblivion. But to the student who attempts to follow
the history of that extraordinary man, Sir Oliver Tressilian, they are
entirely invaluable. And, since I have made this history my present task,
it is fitting that I should here at the outset acknowledge my extreme
indebtedness to those chronicles. Without them, indeed, it were
impossible to reconstruct the life of that Cornish gentleman who
became a renegade and a Barbary Corsair and might have become
Basha of Algiers--or Argire, as his lordship terms it--but for certain
matters which are to be set forth.
Lord Henry wrote with knowledge and authority, and the tale he has to
tell is very complete and full of precious detail. He was, himself, an
eyewitness of much that happened; he pursued a personal acquaintance
with many of those who were connected with Sir Oliver's affairs that he
might amplify his chronicles, and he considered no scrap of gossip that
was to be gleaned along the countryside too trivial to be recorded. I
suspect him also of having received no little assistance from Jasper
Leigh in the matter of those events that happened out of England,
which seem to me to constitute by far the most interesting portion of
his narrative.
R. S.

CONTENTS

PART ONE

SIR OLIVER TRESSILIAN

CHAPTER
I.
THE HUCKSTER
II. ROSAMUND
III. THE FORGE
IV. THE INTERVENER
V. THE BUCKLER
VI. JASPER LEIGH
VII. TREPANNED
VIII. THE SPANIARD

PART TWO
SAKR-EL-BAHR
I. THE CAPTIVE
II. THE RENEGADE
III. HOMEWARD BOUND
IV. THE RAID
V. THE LION OF THE FAITH

VI. THE CONVERT
VII. MARZAK-BEN-ASAD
VIII. MOTHER AND SON
IX. COMPETITORS
X. THE SLAVE-MARKET
XI. THE TRUTH
XII. THE SUBTLETY OF FENZILEH
XIII. IN THE SIGHT OF ALLAH
XIV. THE SIGN
XV. THE VOYAGE
XVI. THE PANNIER
XVII. THE DUPE
XVIII. SHEIK MAT
XIX. THE MUTINEERS
XX. THE MESSENGER
XXI. MORITURUS
XXII. THE SURRENDER
XXIII. THE HEATHEN CREED
XXIV. THE JUDGES
XXV. THE ADVOCATE

XXVI. THE JUDGMENT



PART I
SIR OLIVER TRESSILIAN


CHAPTER I
THE HUCKSTER
Sir Oliver Tressilian sat at his ease in the lofty dining-room of the
handsome house of Penarrow, which he owed to the enterprise of his
father of lamented and lamentable memory and to the skill and
invention of