LITMIR.BIZ

      Published by Good Press, 2019

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      EAN 4064066130664

Table of Contents

       INTRODUCTION

       PREFACE

       MEMOIRS OF JOHN SHIPP

       CHAPTER I

       CHAPTER II

       CHAPTER III

       CHAPTER IV

       CHAPTER V

       CHAPTER VI

       CHAPTER VII

       CHAPTER VIII

       CHAPTER IX

       CHAPTER X

       CHAPTER XI

       CHAPTER XII

       CHAPTER XIII

       CHAPTER XIV

       CHAPTER XV

       CHAPTER XVI

       CHAPTER XVII

       CHAPTER XVIII

       CHAPTER XIX

       CHAPTER XX

       CHAPTER XXI

       CHAPTER XXII

       CHAPTER XXIII

       CHAPTER XXIV

       CHAPTER XXV

       CHAPTER XXVI

       THE END

INTRODUCTION

       Table of Contents

      In reproducing the "Memoirs of the Extraordinary Military Career of John Shipp" as a volume of the Adventure Series, it may be well to say a few introductory words concerning the author and the book.

      John Shipp was, he tells us, the second son of Thomas and Lætitia Shipp, persons in humble circumstances in the little town of Saxmundham, in Suffolk, and he adds that in the registers of the parish church will be found a record of his birth on March 16, 1785. The latter statement is incorrect. The church register records baptisms, not births, and a careful search has shown that the only entry answering to the above is a record of the baptism of John, the child of Thomas and Lætitia Shipp, at a date twelve months earlier—March 16, 1784. The error probably explains the conflicting statements of the author's age which occur in the course of the story.

Shipp's father was a soldier (a marine?), and his mother dying when he was very young, he became an inmate of the parish poorhouse (there were no Union workhouses in those days), whence he passed into the hands of a neighbouring farmer, one of those savage taskmasters only too common in the "good old times."[1] His deliverance came in unexpected fashion. In the early years of the French Revolutionary War the supply of recruits was far less certain than at a later stage. Partly as a recruiting experiment, partly to relieve parishes of the burthen of pauper boys between the ages of ten and sixteen who might be willing to enter for (unlimited) service in the army, three regiments of foot were ordered to be completed to a thousand rank and file each by the enlisting of boys of this description. One of the regiments was the 22nd (Cheshire) Regiment of Foot, which half a century later won much fame under the command of General Sir Charles Napier on the plains of Sind. The 22nd, on return from the West Indies in 1795, had been ordered to Colchester, to recruit; and a Muster Roll, now in the War Office, shows that John Shipp was duly enlisted into that regiment on January 17, 1797.

      Shipp appears to have been a bright, plucky, intelligent boy. Regimental schools were not in those days; but through the kindness of his captain he picked up some education, and after serving in the Channel Islands, at the Cape, and in India, found himself, in the year 1804, a young sergeant in the Grenadier company, which was detached with the grand army under Lord Lake fighting against the Mahrattas. He was one of the stormers at the capture of Deig, on December 24, 1804, and led the "forlorn-hope" of the storming column in three out of the four desperate, but unsuccessful, assaults on Bhurtpore in January-February, 1805, receiving severe wounds upon each occasion. Lord Lake rewarded his daring with an ensigncy in the 65th Foot. A few weeks later he was promoted to lieutenant in the 76th Foot, both commissions being dated March 10, 1805. With the 76th Shipp returned home in 1807; but he speedily found himself in pecuniary difficulties, and sold out of the army on March 19, 1808. His commissions having been given "without purchase," he was only entitled to £100 for each twelve months of actual commissioned service abroad, and £50 for like periods at home, up to the full value—£700. With the small sum so realized he paid his debts, and soon after found himself alone in London, without a shilling in the world.

      Seeing, as he tells us, no reason why he should not rise again as he had done before, Shipp enlisted into the 24th light Dragoons, which he had known in Lake's army; returned to India to join

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