zzen-peak,
and even its blue had been bleached by sun and rain and wind to a dingy
grey. A less romantic and more severely practical ship did not float,
and her captain was of the same type as the ship.

Captain Philip Bowes Vere Broke was an Englishman _pur sang_, and of a
type happily not uncommon. His fame will live as long as the British
flag flies, yet a more sober and prosaic figure can hardly be imagined.
He was not, like Nelson, a quarter-deck Napoleon; he had no gleam of
Dundonald's matchless _ruse de guerre_. He was as deeply religious as
Havelock or one of Cromwell's major-generals; he had the frugality of a
Scotchman, and the heavy-footed common-sense of a Hollander. He was as
nautical as a web-footed bird, and had no more "nerves" than a fish. A
domestic Englishman, whose heart was always with the little girls at
Brokehall, in Suffolk, but for whom the service of his country was a
piety, and who might have competed with Lawrence for his self-chosen
epitaph, "Here lies one who tried to do his duty."

A sober-suited, half-melancholy common-sense was Broke's
characteristic, and he had applied it to the working of his ship, till
he had made the vessel, perhaps, the most formidable fighting machine
of her size afloat. He drilled his gunners until, from the swaying
platform of their decks, they shot with a deadly coolness and accuracy
nothing floating could resist. Broke, as a matter of fact, owed his
famous victory over the _Chesapeake_ to one of his matter-of-fact
precautions. The first broadside fired by the _Chesapeake_ sent a
32-pound shot through one of the gun-room cabins into the magazine
passage of the _Shannon_, where it might easily have ignited some
grains of loose powder and blown the ship up, if Broke had not taken
the precaution of elaborately _damping_ that passage before the action
began. The prosaic side of Broke's character is very amusing. In his
diary he records his world-famous victory thus:--

"June 1st.--Off Boston. Moderate."

"N.W.--W(rote) Laurence."

"P.M.--Took _Chesapeake_."

Was ever a shining victory packed into fewer or duller words? Broke's
scorn of the histrionic is shown by his reply to one of his own men
who, when the _Chesapeake_, one blaze of fluttering colours, was
bearing down upon her drab-coloured opponent, said to his commander,
eyeing the bleached and solitary flag at the _Shannon's_ peak, "Mayn't
we have three ensigns, sir, like she has?" "No," sai