"Even a frigate," he says, "was not sufficiently active for my mind, and I got into a schooner, tender to the Lowestoffe.

In this vessel I made myself a complete pilot for all the passages through the [Keys] Islands situated on the north side Hispaniola." This kind of service, it will be noted, was in direct sequence, as to training, to his handling of the "Triumph's" long-boat in the lower waters of the Thames, and would naturally contribute to increase that "confidence in himself among rocks and sands," which was afterwards to be so "great a comfort" to him.

In his later career he had frequent and pressing need of that particular form of professional judgment and self-reliance for which these early experiences stood him in good stead.

As he afterwards wrote to the First Lord of the Admiralty, when pleading the cause of a daring and skilful officer who had run his ship ashore: "If I had been censured every time I have run my ship, or fleets under my command, into great danger, I should long ago have been _out_ of the service, and never _in_ the House of Peers." At the critical instants of the Nile and Copenhagen, as well as in the less conspicuous but more prolonged anxieties of the operations off Corsica and along the Riviera of Genoa, this early habit, grafted upon the singularly steady nerve wherewith he was endowed by nature, sustained him at a height of daring and achievement to which very few have been able to rise.
The other incident recorded by him as happening while on board the "Lowestoffe," he himself cites as illustrative of temperament.

"Whilst in this frigate, an event happened which presaged my character; and, as it conveys no dishonour to the officer alluded to, I shall insert it.