consequences were appalling, they might have been fatal. In the
general confusion some iron too near the binnacles had attracted the
needle of the compasses; the ship was steered out of her course. At
midnight, in a heavy gale at the close of November, so dark that you
could not distinguish any object, however close, the _Impérieuse_
dashed upon the rocks between Ushant and the Main. The cry of terror
which ran through the lower decks; the grating of the keel as she was
forced in; the violence of the shocks which convulsed the frame of the
vessel; the hurrying up of the ship's company without their clothes;
and then the enormous wave which again bore her up, and carried her
clean over the reef, will never be effaced from my memory."

This, after all, was not an inappropriate introduction to the stormy
three years which followed it. The story is written in the novels,
particularly _Frank Mildmay[1]_ where every item of his varied and
exciting experience is reproduced with dramatic effect. It would be
impossible to rival Marryat's narrative of episodes, and we shall gain
no sense of reality by adjusting the materials of fiction to an exact
accordance with fact. He says that these books, except _Frank Mildmay,_
are "wholly fictitious in characters, in plot, and in events," but they
are none the less truthful pictures of his life at sea. Cochrane's
_Autobiography_ contains a history of the _Impérieuse_; it is from
_Peter Simple_ and his companions that we must learn what Marryat
thought and suffered while on board.

Under Cochrane he cruised along the coast of France from Ushant to the
mouth of the Gironde, saw some active service in the Mediterranean, and,
after a return to the ocean, was finally engaged in the Basque Roads. A
page of his private log contains a lively _resumé_ of the whole
experience:--