Nelson Evening Mail SATURDAY, MARCH, 19, 1921 CAPTAIN ROBERT BALDRY

Nelson Evening Mail, Volume LIV, 19 March 1921, Page 4

Nelson Evening Mail SATURDAY, MARCH, 19, 1921 CAPTAIN ROBERT BALDRY

BETWEEN natures ho dissimilar as Captain Robert Baldry and Sir Mortimer Feme tlierc could hardly fail to be discord and dislike. 'Both were leaders of men, both sojdiers to the finger-tips, both Elizabethan Englishmen, ,but there the parallel ends. Far i to Sir Mortimer there opens up a whole -world closed to Robert Baldry; a world of mental delight, of natural J beauty, of poetry and scholarship and imagination. > In that age of expansion there were many of the type of Sir Mortimer, but there mingled also a fair proportion of Baldry's kind. Hard fighters, hard drinkers, hard boasters, rough livers, quick to a quarrel, over-ready always with "T" r and "mine" —Berserker strainfrom the North Seas. Yet, not all flint and iron; rough and boastful but not base, quarrelsome through lack of courtesy but .in a quarrel downright and straightforward to the end of it. There is always antipathy between such opposite outlooks on life as those of Feme and Baldry. Neither can understand the"other's view and there springs at once, a sort of distrust, a mutual underestimation. - So, when in the assembly room of the Triple Tun Baldry, having drank much sherris sack, listens to the high outpourings of Sir Mortimers poetic; fancy, he feels agrieved. Here is another kind of boasting-surely, but one which is all gracious and seemly. Ps«t'ry and scholarship!**They belong not to his world; they seem to reprove his simple creed of force and strength. And, again, he remembers that at Fayal, in the Azores, he had a brother slain. At Fayal, where this Sir Mortimer led, disaster had come to the English side. Surprise and defeat, and death to many, and one of thesjg Thomas Baldry of the Speedwell. The sherris sack speaks, "I pledgo all scholars turned soldiers, all. courtiers who stay not at court, all poets who win tall ships at the point of a canzonetta! Did Sir Mortimer Feme make verses—elegies and epitaphs and such toys—at Fayal in the Axores two 1 " years ago?" A moment of amazed silence broken again by Baldry with sententious gravity, "Had Nero not fiddled, perhaps Rome had not burned." Sir Mortimer, Baldry being his guest, receives the insult courteously as if there had been merely a compliment to the fashion of his doublet, but as soon as the duties j of a host ceases, "Captain Robert Baldry, since you are no longer guest i of mine, we will - resume our talk of Fayal in the Azores. Your gossips lied, sir; and he who, not staying to examine a quarrel, fcecomcs'a repeater of lies may chance upon a summer day, in a tavern such as this, to be called a liar. My cartel, sir!" For Baldry, to be challenged mea.nt to light,' ' and fight there would hnVe at uiiee, but for Admiral Sir John Nevil who will brook

no quarrel on the eve of the expedition's sailing. So Sir Mortimer withdraws bis challenge and pledges his foe to inooi him with sword and dagger on the day they return to Kuglnml. Hands are shaken and again there is concord, outwardly ai least, but Ualdry cannot forgot that brother slain at Kayak And the memory of his brother's death, with the gnawing thought that Sir Mortimer's leadership may have been in ■some degree responsible for it never leaves him. It is this ungenerous suspicion that is the worst feature in the j Captain of the Star's character. It | Hares up when Sir Mortimer names him to command the captured San l Jose, Haldry's own ship having gone J down in the storm oil' Tcucriffe, "Ij take no favour from the hand of Sit, Mortimer Feme." To which Sir Mor-j tinier, "i give,yon none. Favours Ij keep for friendship, but I deny not justice to my foe."

Tims, with the broach lioiwron the two men widening instead, of narrow-] inyr the Knglish ships come •*<) the Spanish jinr! and there, through treachery. .Sir Mortimer falls into Unhands of tin' tiger and snake, de Cuardiola. To rescue him a desperate attack on the fortress is planned, but de Cuardiola so uses his spy's knowledge as to frustrate this and at th« same lime make his captive believe that, under torture of the rack, he lias betrayed his countrymen to defeat and death. Mall' the. attacking fore perish by ambush,and surprise, hall" the ships are -.sunk in the har--1,,,,,,-, all the treasure is lost, Captain Dabby and many others lie Hounded and prisoners in the enemies' hands. And Sir Mortimer, robbed of his dearer-than-life honour, is set at liberty. Set free' with the thought that he has bought his own life by sending.his foe to the heretic's fiery doom. The last we see of Ualdry is his great form and roaring voice keeping his men together in the deadly ambush of the thorny defile. Yet not quite the last. Before the story closes there comes that wonderful chapter which only Mary Johnston could nave written, where Sir Mortimer, after years of unmerited shame mid bitterness, learns that his honour is as stainless as when he first stood on tho deck of the Cygnet. From tho banquet lie passes out into the night. In the early dawn his friends find him on the seashore. "It hath been a wonderful night," he. said. "They have come to mo one after another—all the men of the Cygnet, and the Phoenix, and the land force—and Captain Hubert ItoMr.V a»d l ~a™ clasped hands, foregoing our quarrel."