punch. When forced below Daniell's cellar, where they by stress of rain or tempest they drank the healths of absent friends in the great cabin. There cannot be many diaries in which so exuberant a proportion of the space is given up to details of food and drink. The motion of the ship in the Bay and during his long cruise in the Mediterranean affected Mr Teonge not at all. "Now our table and chayres are lashed fast to the boardes; our dishes held on the tables, and our bottles of wine in our hands. Many in the ship are casting up their reckonings, and not able to eate or drinke. I am very well." Off the Rock of Lisbon the noble captain of the Assistance feasted the officers of his small squadron with four dishes of meat: "4 excellent henns and a peice of porke boiled in boiled in a dish; a giggett (leg) of excellent mutton and turnips; a peice of beife of 8 ribbs, well seasoned and roasted; and a couple of very fatt greene geese; last of all, a greate Chesshyre cheese; a rare feast at shoare. His Liquors were answerable-viz., Canary, Sherry, Rhenish, Clarett, white wine, syder, ale, beare, all of the best sort; and punch like ditch water (he means as plentiful); with which wee conclude the day and weeke in drinking to the Kinge and all that wee love." At Tangier Mr Teonge came across a Captain Charles Daniell, and was by him nobly entertained. First the Teonge party drank several bottles of wine, and then adjourned to Captain 66 feasted upon roast beef cold, Westphalia polony pudding, parmesan cheese, cucumbers, muskmelons, salletts, and a reive of Spanish onions as thick as my thigh." Afterwards the thoughtful Captain Daniell sent a corporal to see his guests, "stowed with good wine," safe to their pinnace. Such a harty entertaynment," exclaims Mr Teonge, "I never saw before from a meare stranger; nor never shall againe till I returne to the prince-like Capt. Daniell." Yet the merry old gentleman was to do very much better later on. The ship went on towards the Barbary coast and the bombardment of Tripoli, and every evening Mr Teonge and his friends-the Captaine, the Leiuetenant, and the Pursor according to their "woonted custum," ended the day with two bowls of punch, varied by bottles of Mediterranean wines. "Instead of punch this evening wee drink healths to our friends in mountain Aligant." "Wee end the day as before with Florence wine." Wee end the day and weeke according to our oulde custom." 66 66 Wee drink to our friends in good Rubola." The occasion of sighting the Barbary coast was celebrated in a manner gratifying to Mr Teonge, "with good porke, beife, gheese, ducks, henns, chickens; and for sauce plenty of good sack, mountaine Aligant, clarett, white wine, and English ale, the raryty of all.' At Zante the officers of the Assistance and her two con sorts entered eagerly upon a drinking competition to decide the respective merits of two wines which Mr Teonge calls Syracoosa and Rubella. The occasion, so much more interesting to him than the official naval operations against the Barbary pirates, inspired Mr Teonge, the chaplain, to compose a poem in its honour. It was a competition in which there were many casualties. One need not suppose that Mr Teonge in his tastes was more gross than were other lusty parsons of his epoch, and there cannot have been many parsons, then or now, who surpassed him in pluck and in irrepressibly high spirits. "A brave gale all night," he cries, and more myrth at dinner this day than ever since wee cam on board. The wind blew very hard, and wee had to dinner a rump of Zante beife, a little salted and well rosted. When it was brought in to the cabin and set on the table (that is, on the floore, for it could not stand on the table for the ship's tossing), our Captaine sent for the Master, Mr Fogg, and Mr Davis to dine with himselfe and myselfe and the Leiuetenant and the Pursor. And we all satte closse round about the beife, some securing themselves from slurring by setting their feete against the table, which was fast tyd downe. The Leiue tenant set his feete against the bedd, and the Captaine set his back against a chayre which stood by the syd of the ship. Several tumbles we had, wee and our plates, and our knives slurred oft together. Our liquor was white rubola, admirable good. Wee had also a couple of fatt pulletts; and whilst wee were eating of them, a sea cam and forced into the cabin through the chinks of a port-hole, which by lookeing behind I just discovered when the water was coming under mee. I soone got up and no whitt wet; but all the rest were well washed and got up as fast as they could, and laughed one at the other. Wee dranke the King's and Duke's healths, and all our wives particularly; and cam out at 2 a clock." And the man who wrote like this of a "brave gale" in the autumn off Crete, and of the "myrth" which it occasioned, was a landsman of fifty-four who was making his first voyage in a seventeenth century sailing ship, a fourth rater of 521 tons! He was of a quality very different from that of the feeble folk of to-day who write letters to The Times' bewailing the discomforts of crossing the Channel in railway steamers. Mr Teonge's bad weather continued, and two days later he writes: "A fine gale still.... Wee doe this evening remember our friends in England in good rubola." By this time-October 1675 Mr Teonge, who was as deft with his fingers as with his teeth, had made himself a new "cassacke." A month later he began to net his "sylke gyrdle," and cast about how to acquire linen for sheets to the notice of the editor of his diary. He guesses at the chaplain's age and guesses wrong. As In May 1676, Mr Teonge took part in his record meal. was that of the prince-like Captain Daniell, this feast was served ashore, somewhere be his bed. Our Leiuetenant which seems to have escaped and Pursor" used to go ashore at every port to keep up the supply of beverage wine, and a new liquor called "rackee " became available for drinking to friends in England. England. By now Mr Teonge's very catholic palate had become accustomed to punch, mountain Alicant, tween Aleppo and AlexandFlorence wine, Syracoosa, Rubola, Cyprus wine, the "excellent strong wines" of Zante, boath white and redd," and rackee-and yet, like a patriotic Englishman and an old Cavalier, he often sighed for plain "English beare," that greatest raryty of all." His worst days were those when there was "no thinking of friends"; happily they were infrequent. 66 We may roughly measure the internal capacity of these astonishing trenchermen from Mr Teonge's description of a feast prepared by the four friends for four guests of their own kidney, eight in all. "Wee had a gallant baked pudding, an excellent legge of porke and colliflowers, an excellent dish made of piggs' pettitoes, 2 rosted piggs, one turkey cock, a rosted hogg's (sheep's) head, 3 ducks, a dish of Cyprus burds, and pistachoes and dates together, and store of good wines. God bless those that are at sea! The weather is very bad." The Assistance was at the time in harbour at Malta. On 18th March 1675-6-the calendar year began on Lady Day, 25th March-Mr Teonge celebrated his "byrth day; nat. 55," a valuable entry VOL. CCXVII.-NO. MCCCXVI. retta (which Mr Teonge calls It cannot be said that Mr Teonge repaid much in work for the prodigious quantities of food and drink which he consumed. On Sundays he read prayers, and he preached a sermon when a plausible excuse for its omission was not available. There were many 2 I crew. There were 220 of them in the Assistance; not one is mentioned except in connection with a punishment or a death. He would look on at punishments and make appropriate clerical comments, and, as the men died of disease, he would indifferently bury them overboard. It was not to be expected that he would concern himself in the men; no one did. While the Captaine, the Leiuetenant, the Pursor, and the Chaplen were about their daily potations the men were left to pay regard to the safety of the ship; that is what they were for. And if they discharged their duties imperfectly, or failed to discharge them at all, their feet were locked in bilboes, or they were hauled up to a yardarm and dropped thence into the sea. such excuses: by reason of terest in the welfare of the the business of the ship, the Captaine not well, the Captaine dining ashore, and so on. Now and then there was even no time for prayers to-day." Upon his first voyage Mr Teonge was kept fairly regularly to his weekly sermon, but his second captain, quite evidently bored by his discourses, became an accomplice in their collusive omission. The contrast between Mr Teonge's professional Sabbath piety and the exuberance of his life between whiles may have been too much even for the strong stomachs of Charles the Second's officers, though in this we may easily do him and them injustice. He tells stories with a rich candour which I would imitate here if I dared, but there is no evidence in the diary that he was a bad man by the standards of his day. He was completely selfish, he possessed that combination of hard heart with perfect digestion which is said to be the first requisite for a happy life, and he was always willing to neglect such small spiritual duties as fell to him to discharge. But none of these qualities or disqualities would have misbeseemed a minister of the Gospel in the reign of his Sacred Majesty. We can believe that he mouthed the offices of the Church as wholeheartedly as he drank punch. He never drank for the sake of drinking; it was always the health of absent friends which inspired his libations. It cannot be said that Mr Teonge took the smallest in Ducking, a punishment handy to come by, was highly regarded in the seventeenth century Navy. It took little time to reeve a rope about a man's waist and between his legs, haul him up to a yard, and drop him. It might be done again and again in the space of a few minutes, and it was not necessary to take the way off the ship. As a punishment most excellently convenient. In his youth Mr Teonge had been a Cavalier trooper; his ears must have grown accustomed to strange oaths, and we cannot feel that his disapproval of swearers was other than professional. Yet we find him unctuously describing this punishment as 'an excellent grateful comment, though we cure for swearers. . . . This day David Thomas and Marlin the coock, and our master's boy, had their hand stretched out, and with their back to the rayles, and the master's boy with his back to the maine mast, all looking one upon another, and in each of their mouths a maudlen-spike-viz., an iron pinn clapt closse into their mouths, and tyd behind their heads; and there they stood a whole houre, till their mouths were very bloody." Here is another entry dropped in without comment : A seaman has 29 lashes with a cat of 9 tayles, and was then washed with salt water, for stealing our carpenter's mate's wives ring." As an entry suitable for a Sunday this is a perfect gem: "I preacht a sermon on the word Father. Isaac Webb stood tied to the gunns an hour and had speculum oris placed in his mouth for saying to a seaman in the captaine's hearing, 'Thou lyest like the son of a whore.' Mr Teonge, who had no duties save on Sundays, went ashore as much as he pleased, but at Falmouth, towards the end of a long and weary voyage, one Arrowsmyth, for lying ashoare without leave, was ducked at the yard arme." One Arrowsmyth, unluckily for him, had duties. On Friday, the 17th of November 1676, after serving his Majesty afloat for eighteen months, Mr Teonge "was payd off at Dedford; where we leave the rottenest frigot that ever cam to England." An un must allow something for sea weariness; the rotten frigot had filled his belly pretty generously. 66 Mr Teonge had the singular good fortune to draw his pay and his allowances-a deduction of 4d. a month from the pay of each seaman for the chaplain-out of the hard-fisted Treasury of King Charles, so that he returned to London with a "goode summ of monys" and spent greate part of it " before going home to his wife and family in Warwickshire. There for several months he lived uneasily, being daily dunned by some or other, or in fear of "land pyrates, which I hated worse than Turkes." He was getting on for fiftyseven years old when the narrow circumstances of his vicarage at Spernall drove him once more to seek the ample provender of the sea. The years had wrought some change in him. He was older for one thing; the exuberance of his first youth was passing. The chaplain who had entered so cheerily upon a strange maritime adventure in May 1675, and who declared that no life ashore was comparable with 'this sea, where wee have good meate and good drinke provided for us, and good company and good divertisments, had by April 1678 grown to be slightly middle-aged. How can one tell? Easily and surely. The Mr Teonge of 1678 begins to be less content with his meals. 66 He left Warwick for London on 1st April 1678, travelling |