to the Channel fleet, Captain Jervis was appointed senior officer of the inshore squadron off Brest, which honorable post he held until his ship was wrecked on a sunken rock near the Saintes, Mar. 25th, 1804. On this occasion, all private property was lost, and about seventy or eighty of the Magnificent’s crew had the misfortune to be taken prisoners.
In May, 1804, Mr. Gosling rejoined Captain Jervis, who was then about to assume the command of the Tonnant 80, stationed off Ferrol. During a subsequent cruise in the Bay of Biscay, this ship had her main-mast much damaged, one man killed, and ten persons severely injured by lightning. On the 26th of Jan. 1805, she joined the Channel fleet with despatches from Rear-Admiral Sir Thomas Graves, relative to the escape of the Rochefort squadron, and Captain Jervis was unfortunately drowned, by the upsetting of a boat, while proceeding to the flag-ship. A memoir of this officer will be found in the Naval Chronicle, Vol. XX.
About Mar. 1805, Mr. Gosling, who had thus been deprived of the friend of his early youth, was removed from the Tonnant, then commanded by Captain Charles Tyler, to the Blenheim 74, bearing the flag of Sir Thomas Troubridge, whom he accompanied to the East India station, and whose melancholy fate he escaped sharing, by being placed on board the Fox frigate, Captain the Hon. Archibald Cochrane, to prevent his remaining idle while the Blenheim was under-going repair at Pulo-Penang, after getting aground on a sand at the entrance of the Straits of Malacca, where she sustained the serious damages which led to her supposed ingulphment, near the island of Rodrigues, in Feb. 1807[1].
In consequence of this disastrous event, Mr. Gosling returned home in the Concorde frigate, Captain John Cramer (now Sir Josiah Coghill); and on that ship being paid off, in Sept. 1807, he was turned over to the York 74, Captain Robert Barton, under whom he served as master’s-mate and acting lieutenant for a period of nearly two years.
