Westward Ho! By Charles Kingsley 1947 Hard Cover

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Westward Ho! By Charles Kingsley

or The voyages and adventures of Sir Amyas Leigh, Knight of Burrough in the County of Devon, in the reign of her most glorious Queen Elizabeth

Hard Cover

427 pages

Heritage Press

CONTENTS

I How Mr. Oxenham Saw the White Bird3

II How Amyas Came Home the First Time16

III Of Two Gentlemen of Wales, and How They Hunted With the Hounds, and Yet Ran With the Deer30

IV The Two Ways of Being Crost in Love40

V Clovelly Court in the Olden Time53

VI The Coombes of the Far West70

VII The True and Tragical History of Mr. John Oxenham of Plymouth77

VIII How the Noble Brotherhood of the Rose Was Founded 101

IX How Amyas Kept His Christmas Day 113

X How the Mayor of Bideford Baited His Hook With His Own Flesh134

XI How Eustace Leigh Met the Pope's Legate140

XII How Bideford Bridge Dined at Annery House152

XIII How the Golden Hind Came Home Again166

XIV How Salvation Yeo Slew the King of the Gubbings 175

XV How Mr. John Brimblecombe Understood the Nature of an Oath194

XVI The Most Chivalrous Adventure of the Good Ship Rose202

XVIIHow They Came to Barbados, and Found No Men Therein214

XVIIIHow They Took the Pearls at Margarita218

XIXWhat Befell at La Guayra225

XX Spanish Bloodhounds and English Mastiffs244

XXI How They Took the Communion Under the Tree at Higuerote263

XXII The Inquisition in the Indies278

XXIII The Banks of the Meta282

XXIV How Amyas Was Tempted of the Devil293

XXV How They Took the Gold-Train309

XXVI How They Took the Great Galleon331

XXVII How Salvation Yeo Found His Little Maid Again 353

XXVIIIHow Amyas Came Home the Third Time362

XXIX How the Virginia Fleet Was Stopped by the Queen's Command372

XXXThe Great Armada387

XXXIHow Amyas Threw His Sword into the Sea406

XXXIIHow Amyas Let the Apple Fall423

INTRODUCTION

SOMERSET MAUGHAM asserted that he "once knew a man who read The Pickwick Papers every year for thirty years", and the way Mr. Maugham phrases it he obviously believed the man - he does not say "who told me he read". Such a declaration must always be taken with a grain, or better with a whole pinch, of salt. The Pickwickian may have been telling the truth, or his estimate may have been liberal (by five or ten or twenty-nine years), or he may have skimmed the pages occasionally, or reread favorite passages. I mention the incident not to dispute the gentleman's word or to assert Mr. Maugham's gullibility, but only in order to introduce a parallel experience in which I believe another reader of another book was wholly truthful.

When I began assembling data for this introduction I thought it would be an excellent idea to start out by re-reading " Westward Ho ! " (it became immediately obvious, by the way, that the edition with which I was familiar in childhood was certainly an abridgment, of which more anon). I secured a large library copy, and a great, thick, ugly octavo it was - a regular brick of a book, almost a cornerstone. I boarded one of New York's few remaining street cars with this formidable piece of literary masonry under my arm and was immediately greeted by a college classmate whom I had seen two or three times during recent weeks after an interval of probably a dozen years. The delight of honest friendship is that it can be resumed instantly regardless of the length of time it has been in abeyance; there are no preliminaries or formalities to observe, no protocol to be established, no modus vivendi to be set up. Those two or three meetings had found us on as familiar a footing as if we had been commuting on the same train for years.

"What you got there?" my friend asked me, pointing to the redoubtable parallelepiped. Now I always enjoy being asked what book I am carrying (if it is the right kind of book), since a certain degree of intellectual prestige redounds to the reader if he is equipped with, say, "The Lusiads" of Camoens, Newton's "Principia", or something by John Dewey. A straight-out novel, particularly a Victorian standby, was hardly in the class with these, but I was sure it was still a cut above the customary literary pabulum of my friend, who I would have set down as a pushover for whodunits, Cosmopolitan, and The Wall Street Journal. From college days I recalled him as a hail-fellow-well-met, jovial, the best of mixers, and member of a fraternity which made no intellectual pretensions - now, he had told me, he was selling trucks. So with just the slightest air of superiority, the tiniest tilting of the nose, I held the shelfback of the volume toward him.

" `Westward Ho!' " he exclaimed with pleasure. "Amyas Leigh has always been one of my heroes. A great book! I've read it fifteen times - no, twenty times."

I believed him. I still believe him.

CHARLES KINGSLEY was born (Holne Vicarage, Dartmoor, Devon) on June 12, 1819, twelve days after Walt Whitman (West Hills, Long Island) and seventeen days after Princess Victoria (Kensington Palace). A good many years later Kingsley read some of Whitman and did not care for it. But he grew up with and into the Victorian Era - grew up to typify it better, perhaps, than any other man of letters of his day. But Kingsley's Victorianism was far from being a smug and complacent acceptance of things as they were. He was a zealous crusader for social reform, and if he were alive today he would certainly be viewed askance by the National Association of Manufacturers. But the Queen thought well of him, and he of her.

Altogether, indeed, he was a man of consistent contrasts. He was the homebody of a roving family. His brother George, eight years Charles's junior, went to Paris to study medicine and was wounded at the barricades during the troubles of '48. He returned to England to adopt the most delectable method of treating patients that ever physician prescribed. He took them on trips, or they took him, and eventually his therapeutic argosies covered the whole world. George's daughter Mary became a celebrated African traveler, climbed the Great Cameroon (13,760 feet) by a route never previously attempted, and died in 1900 of enteric fever contracted while attending Boer prisoners. Charles's next younger brother Henry left Oxford for the Australian goldfields at the age of twenty-three (he wrote a novel about it) and became a war correspondent in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71.

Charles himself left the shore of England only four times - in 1851 for a few weeks in Germany, in 1864 for an equal period in France, in 1870 for a visit to the West Indies, and in 1874, the longest absence of all (January to August), to America.

Charles's boyhood, youth, and education followed much the orthodox pattern for a clergyman's son of his day. He entered Magdalen College, Cambridge, and acquitted himself creditably rather than brilliantly, finding time for boating, boxing, and fishing. These activities, mild as they must appear, seem to have given him the reputation of a harum-scarum in the eyes of the family of Fanny Grenfell, whose heart he won in the summer of 1839. The couple were forbidden to correspond for a year, presumably on the theory that the fires of love would eventually subside through lack of fuel, but the privation happily failed of its intended effect, and the couple were married in 1844. The dire expectations of the father-in-law were not realized; Mrs. Kingsley survived to write a memoir of her husband and to edit his letters - a work which, while hardly critical, remains the most nearly complete treatment ever accorded him.

Two years before his marriage Kingsley had been appointed curate of Eversley, in Hampshire, a post he was to fill throughout the thirty-three years of life that remained to him. His parishioners were humble and unlettered people

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