64 S T . J A G O.
for carrying on a contraband trade with the natives of this
part of South America, whom the mother country is not only
either unable or unwilling to supply but, like the dog in the
manger, endeavours to prevent all other nations from doing
i • he Dunkirk ships were chiefly manned with English
seamen, and were strongly suspected to be fitted out on
English capitals. One of them was the old Resolution of
Captain Cooke, now transformed to a smuggling whaler under
the French name of La Liberté ; and, what was still worse
bearing the French republican flag. I am not ashamed to
confess that my feelings were considerably hurt in witnessing
tins degradation of an object so intimately connected with
that great man. Such a feeling, though excited by an inanimate
object, is not, I trust, either uncommon or unnatural
“ There is not,” says Pope, when describing his sensationTon
revisiting the place of his birth, “ an old post by the road-
“ side which does not awaken the recollection of some pleas
« ing scene in my childish days • and it gives me pain to see
even one of these old remembrancers destroyed." Few I
believe, will envy that man's feelings, who can see without
emotion the house in which he was born, and in which he
spent his happiest years, either wholly demolished or degraded
to some unworthy purpose. The Resolution was the house of
our immortal Cooke and, out of respect to his memory, I
would have laid her up in a dock, till she had wasted away
plank by plank. I t was thus that Queen Elizabeth shewed
her veneration for the object that carried her favourite Drake
round the world. His ship was preserved with great care for
many years, in the dock-yard of Deptford ; and when time
had gradually reduced her to such a state of decay that she