ADVENTURES OF A YOUNGER SON.

New Zealand Graphic, Volume V, Issue 44, 1 November 1890, Page 8

ADVENTURES OF A YOUNGER SON.

Edward J. Trelawny was born in Cornwall in 1792. At the age of twelve he went to sea on the man-o’-war Superb under Admiral Duckworth. He just missed taking part in the battle of Trafalgar by- a three days’ delay- at Plymouth to take in ‘ mutton and potatoes. ’ According to his own account he subsequently served in asloon of war as a midshipman, visiting the East Indian Seas. The records of his family, however, fail to show that he ever held a warrant or commission in the navy. The presumption is that he joined a merchantman and deserted somewhere in the Indies. His ‘Adventures’ then go on to relate how at Bombay he fell in with a naturalised American named De Ruyter whoseems to have been a cross of pirate and privateer/ cruising under a French letter of marque against British commerce in the Orient. Trelawny appears to have been a young fellow of good and generous impulses, but of utterly lawlessproclivities, and De Ruyter was just the man to fascinate him. Together they ravaged the Indian seas, varying their semi-piratical life on blue water with an idyllic existence in the mountains of the Isle of France, then a French possession. When afloat almost anything that was not French Dutch or American was fair game for them. They hovered around the convoys of the East India Company, swooping down upon any luckless vessel that fell out from under the guns of the protecting squadron. In default of such fortune they are not above pillaging a ‘ countrywallah ’ or a Chinese junk. They fraternized with the. Malay. corsairs of the Archipelago, and sometimes varied their salt-water adventures with a tiger-hunt-ing excursion in Java or Sumatra. A cruise among the island groups which dot the sea between the Indies and Australia gives fascinating glimpses of tropical beauty and delights. Among Trelawny’s captures is a lovely Arab girl, whom he makes his wife without the ceremony of Christian, wedlock, although quite in accordance with Oriental usages. She accompanied him in-all his stirring adventures by field and flood and was a stanch and spirited helpmeet in his wild life. After her death, with the prospect of the capture of the Isle of France by England, Trelawny and De Ruyter sailed for France, where they parted company, the former returning to England, the latter to America. Trelawny was subsequently the companion of Byron and Shelley. With the former he bore a part in the struggle of Greece for liberty. Later he returned to England, wrotehis ‘ Adventures,’ and for a while went much into society. In 1834 he visited the United States. He is said to have nearly lost his life in a reckless attempt to swim the rapids above Niagara. Returning to England, the hot blood of youth somewhat cooled, he settled down to agriculture, varied by literary work. In 1858 he published his ‘Recollections of Shelley aud Byron,’ a work of unmistakable power and profound and discriminating insight into the characters of the two men. Although somewhat tamed and disillusionized by time and experience, he retained hisruggedness and uneonventionality. He died of old age August 13, 1881, at the age of eighty-eight. His character seems to have been a mixture of daring, romanticism, love of liberty, destestation of all restraint, social, political, or religious, generosity, vanity and recklessness, yet with acute judgment of character and much of the hard-headed-ness of a thorough man of the world.