A Sense of the World by Jason Roberts

Author:Jason Roberts
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins

YOUNG JAMES WOULD remember the next year and a half only as a blur, “crammed with geography, astronomy, algebra, geometry, navigation, et cetera.” The Exeter apothecary shop was a memory. He was now a boarding student at a private naval preparatory school in the port town of Gosport, by the broad anchorage waters known as Spithead. He had to hurry to catch up. Many of his new classmates, like him “destined to the naval service,” had begun their vocational education a full two years earlier.

But he was an intelligent child, with a talent for attention. The late start proved no handicap, and formal enlistment in the Royal Navy came three weeks after his twelfth birthday. It was a day auspiciously marked by a brilliant early-morning display of shooting stars. He may have seen the last of them from the thwart of his shore launch in Spithead harbor, were he not too intent on watching the Royal George loom closer with each stroke of the oars.

His naval career would officially begin the moment he first stood on the ship’s deck. An event carefully noted since it would forever fix his seniority in the Naval List, the precise ranking of all officers and candidate officers in the Royal Navy. Just prior to reporting for duty, he appears to have taken a last liberty with his own chronology. It was a freshly twelve James who mounted the boarding ladder, but by the top rung he was Volunteer Holman, reporting his age as thirteen to the recording officer.

It was December 7, 1798. Napoleon had conquered Italy, Malta, and Egypt, and was laying the groundwork to declare himself dictator of France. Now three Holman sons were fighting a war that would prove to be the deadliest in human history (later conflicts would claim more lives cumulatively, but none have offered worse odds of individual survival). Yet the first son to be mourned wore not a uniform, but an apron. Only four days after James’s enlistment, John, the eldest, died suddenly in Exeter at the age of twenty-four.

It was clearly a rapid and unexpected death, as it blew apart the senior John’s master plan. Had the tragedy occurred just a few days earlier, there’s little doubt that James would have been tapped to take his brother’s place. But enlistment was not reversible; no extenuating circumstances would release him, or Samuel, or William from serving for the duration of the war.

The elder John Holman might have entertained thoughts of running the shop single-handedly until a fifth son (Robert, then nine) came of age, but ultimately it was more practical to offer a partnership to one of his apprentices, John Ham. This decision carried significant consequences. The profits from the apothecary shop, already declining along with Exeter’s economy, would now be split two ways. There would be few funds available for career-boosting. The boys were on their own.

James mourned his brother. But rocking in his sea hammock, late at night, he also considered himself fortunate to have barely dodged the burden of the family shop.

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