HKB
screw, she turned almost in her own length, and brought up alongside the jetty--a novel proceeding over which the commodore, an old salt, was still gasping when I went ashore.
During this visit to the Thames the little flotilla went up to Woolwich, where we were welcomed by the English authorities with that frank cordiality with which they have almost always received me. We were shown both the arsenal and the dockyard. In the dockyard basin a steam corvette with paddle-wheels was lying, which had a new arrangement of which I had heard a great deal. The sponsons formed great rafts which could be lowered into the water by an ingenious mechanical contrivance, and which, in case of its being necessary to land troops, would carry a large number at a time, and even save the crew in a case of disaster. This, indeed, did occur in the Crimea and elsewhere, after our ships had all been equipped with the invention.
Commodore Sir Frederick Collier was good enough to have these rafts experimented with at my request. I turned my opportunity of seeing them to good account. When I was back in Paris, some two or three months later, the English naval captain (his name escapes me, I fancy it was Smith), who had invented this raft system, asked me to receive him. He came, so he told me, to offer his plan to the French navy, and on the strength of the interest with which I had followed the trial of his boat at Woolwich, he begged me to recommend it to the minister for that department of affairs. Further, he offered to bring me a model of it.
"Wait one moment," I replied.
I rang the bell, and sent for an old workman who was in my employment. He came, with a model of my visitor's boat and lowering apparatus in his hand, constructed on drawings I had made on my return from England. The inventor stood as though petrified at the sight. The only word he said was "Wonderful!" It appears I had caught the likeness at once. What it is to know how to draw!
Let me add, by the way, that the old workman to whom I have just referred had been a ship's carpenter with the fleet commanded by Villaret de Joyeuse in the naval engagement which we call the Battle of the 13th Prairial, and the English that of the 1st of June. At my house he often met an academician, as old as himself, of the name of Dupaty, who had also been a sailor, and present at the same battle. The two old warriors would interchange recollections, which amused me much, and often interested me deeply as well.