Page:Royal Naval Biography Marshall v3p1.djvu/202

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POST CAPTAINS OF 1824.
187

latter ship immediately sent her boats, and brought off part of the prize-crew and about 120 Frenchmen, which were as many as the boats would contain. At 10-30 p.m., the Redoubtable being with her stern entirely under water, the Swiftsure cut herself clear. At about midnight, the wind shifted to N.W., and still blew a gale. At 3-30 a.m. on the 23d, attracted by the cries of the people, the Swiftsure again sent her boats, and, from three rafts which the French crew, amidst a dreadful night of wind, rain, and lightning, had constructed from the spars of their sunken ship, saved fifty more of the sufferers. The remaining survivors of the Redoubtable’s late officers and crew, thirteen of the Temeraire’s men, and five of the Swiftsure’s, perished in her.”

The Swiftsure was paid off, at Portsmouth, towards the end of 1807; and Lieutenant Barclay was soon afterwards appointed second of the Diana frigate, Captain Charles Grant, employed on channel service. While serving under that officer, he was upset in a six-oared cutter, between Sandwich Bay and Ramsgate, at a distance of three miles from the shore, but providentially preserved, with all his companions, by another boat which came out from the latter place on witnessing the accident.

Shortly after this remarkable escape. Lieutenant Barclay commanded a detachment of boats, and lost his left arm, in an attack upon a French convoy going from Nantz to Rochfort, with supplies for the enemy’s squadron. In 1809, he was granted a pension for the loss of his limb, and sent to Halifax on promotion. Unfortunately for him, however, a change soon took place in the naval administration, and four years more elapsed before he obtained advancement. From the period of his arrival on that station he served as first lieutenant of the AEolus and Iphigenia, frigates, until Nov. 1812, when he was again ordered thither, with another official recommendation in his favor. Early in 1813, we find him appointed by Sir John Borlase Warren to the naval command on the Canadian lakes, and directed to conduct a small party of officers overland from Halifax to Quebec.

Could the Admiral have spared some British seamen as well as officers, it is probable that the Americans might have been attacked with success on their return from the capture of