Search for A Sword - The Story of Captain John

Fleming R.N. (1772 - 1849)

Two hundred years ago, exactly eleven weeks to the day after Nelson’s great battle at
Trafalgar, on January 6, 1806, one of Scotland’s oft-forgotten heroes, Captain John
Fleming R.N. of Glencreggan and Muasdale in Kintyre, was involved in an action for which
his ‘singular gallantry’ led him to be presented with a ‘sword of honour’ from The Patriotic
Fund of Lloyds of London, the whereabouts of the sword, last known to be in the
possession of Fleming’s grand-daughter, a Miss Eddington, a frequent visitor to Lauder, in
The Scottish Borders, around 1930, now unknown.

Britain's first-ever memorial to Lord Nelson was erected

by local iron-foundry workers at Taynuilt, near Loch Etive
(Photograph by John Macfarlane)

While Fleming's exploits were immortalised in Dr Norman MacLeod’s story of “The Old
Lieutenant and His Son”, a book widely read in later years in both Britain and America, the
story begins in 1658 when Fleming’s great-great-great-grandparents, James Flemying and
Jenat Strang, from Kirktoune of Kilbryde, now better known as East Kilbride, came to the
holding of ‘Bellirgiemore’ in Kintyre, their descendents, including Fleming’s uncle’s family,
farming at Ballivain, on the west side of Kintyre, beside the Westport, from around 1719
till 1844. Fleming’s father Matthew, being a younger son, left the farm to the hands of his
brother and took to the sea to become a shipmaster, Matthew losing his life, almost in
sight of home, when his ship was wrecked off Gigha.

Inspired no doubt by his father, John Fleming, who was born on the last day of December
1772, too went off to the sea and was a junior officer on a merchant ship when, in 1794,
at the age of twenty-one, he found himself being press-ganged to join the navy as a
seaman ! Six years earlier, in 1788, The Admiralty, to curb the excesses of the press-
gangs which received a ‘bounty’ for each new ‘recruit’, had instituted the Impress Service,
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commanded by commissioned officers who carried warrants recently signed, but undated,
by magistrates to seize their victims.

Under the rules, crews of out-bound merchant ships, naval auxiliaries, ration-suppliers
and Trinity House ships and their apprentices were all protected from seizure and, under
the rules, no captains, chief mates or pilots belonging to any ship, whether inward or
outward-bound could be seized either - The word ‘press’ itself was a corruption of the
French ‘prest’ and the ‘prest’ or ‘imprest’, like ‘the King’s shilling’, was a token of the
wages due to whoever was enlisted !

Thus, confronted by the press-gang and well-knowing that they could legally seize him at
that particular point in time, Fleming, to avoid being employed as an ordinary seaman,
volunteered to join the navy provided he was allowed to join as a midshipman ! And so it
was that the 21-year old John Fleming began his naval career on the 18-gun “Hornet” in
1794.

By February 1795 , Fleming, because of his previous merchant ship experience, had
quickly been elevated to the position of Master’s Mate. The duties of a ship’s sailing-master
were indeed even more comprehensive and arduous than those of any officer aboard and
his supervision and responsibility extended to almost all the public stores in the ship and in
particular to the ship’s stores of water and spirits and to the state of the ship’s cables and
anchors. It was also the sailing-master’s responsibility to report the daily use of water to
the captain and, twice a day, to report to him
the ship’s position, together with the bearings and distance of the port to which the ship
was bound, or of the nearest land desired.

Between February 1795 and October 1800, Fleming then successively served on the
“Flora”; the 32-gun “Lowestoffe”, which had been home to the newly promoted
‘Lieutenant’ Nelson from April 10, 1777 until the summer of 1778; the 38-gun “Tamar”,
where Fleming during the unsuccessful attack on Porto Rico in The West Indies in April
1797; the 64-gun “Dictator” and then, in 1798, to the 38-gun “Fisgard” patrolling the
French coast.

All through 1798 the people of Britain had lived in a state of wild excitement, nearly every
day bringing tidings of threatened invasions or of the misfortunes of the campaign in The
Low Country, under the Duke of York, of all the financial difficulties which then beset the
British Government and of the construction of a French Flotilla at Brest, where Fleming’s
“Fisgard” was patrolling, to be employed for landing troops on Britain’s shores. The
feelings of excitement were intensified by the slow rate of sending and by the exaggerated
stories carried by travellers. All this created alarm and the presence of an enemy was
feared from even the most unexpected quarter and there was no way that Fleming could
have known of the drama unfolding back at home in far-distant Kintyre !

Shortly after six o’clock that evening, Monday, October 8, 1798, a horseman, who,
judging from the worn out appearance of his horse, had ridden hard and fast, trotted past
Inveraray’s church and asked for direction to Provost
Lachlan Campbell’s house. The messenger had ridden post haste from Campbeltown and
he now informed the stately old gentleman that he had been dispatched to summon the
military as the French fleet was cruising off Cantyre and that several crews had already
landed and begun to plunder some of the farms. The people were panic-stricken and many
were fleeing in the direction of Tarbert.

Provost Lachlan Campbell and the messenger set off for the Maltlands Barracks where they
conveyed the startling news to Colonel Clavering. The men were collected and fell in, the
only piper the regiment possessed marching up and down the lines, pipes in full blast
screeching the Campbell call and the regimental drummers beating away with might and
main and a supply of oatmeal, a little salt and 60 rounds of ball shot, with corresponding
amounts of gunpowder, were served out to each man and, as darkness set in, the
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Volunteers marched out through the town with Colonel Clavering, Captain Macdougall of
Gallanagh and their adjutant, Captain Stevenson at their head.

Without the aid of any moon that night, the march, down to Lochgair, on by the old
Cossack Inn above Achnaba, round the head of Loch Gilp, went on till they reached West
Loch Tarbert where, having covered 38-miles, a short halt was called. Here the people
were in a state of intense excitement as the French fleet was still hovering about and a
company was detached, to march over the drove road and round the high lochs to
Carradale. It arrived in time to find one of the French ships tacking close inshore to take
advantage of the evening breeze to carry it offshore again and the detachment, not
understanding the ship’s manoeuvre, took cover and began a fusilade. The French sent a
few shots in their direction and sailed off.

Meanwhile, the regiment had marched south to Kilchenzie, where they detached another
company and then on across the hill to Dun Bhan, some three miles to the north of the new
Mull of Kintyre lighthouse, completed just a decade before, in 1788 and, before daybreak
on the Friday morning, October 12, 1798, the Volunteers were startled to hear heavy
firing coming from seaward. They could see flashes of fire as guns were fired and, at
intervals, the sound of cheering fell on their ears. The men were posted along the shore
and too began firing volleys. As the cheering came from the sea, they also set up hurrahs
of defiance knowing that a battle was in progress. When daylight came they saw the
French ships had been engaged by a British squadron, under the command of Sir John
Warren and by noon that day seven of the nine French ships had been captured and the
French defeated.

Eight days after the action off The Mull of Kintyre, on Saturday, October 20, 1798 and
Fleming aboard the 38-gun gun “Fisgard” patrolling the French coast off Brest, they found
themselves in action against the 42-gun French frigate “L’Immortalite”, 281 men against
580 men on the enemy. After having engaged the French ship for nearly an hour in a
running fight, the “Fisgard” managed to bring the much bigger “L’Immortalite” to close
quarters and, after a sharp action of some twenty-five minutes, in which the whole of the
running rigging of the British ship was cut to pieces, the Frenchman, taking advantage of
his opponent’s crippled condition, tried to make an escape.

Despite the seeming unmanageable condition of the “Fisgard”, her officers and crew
quickly repaired her rigging and soon came again to close quarters with the French frigate,
this second close action lasting just under two hours and resulting in the surrender of the
“L’Immortalite”, her commander and 54 of her crew killed and another 61 wounded.

Fleming, whose own ship had lost only 10 men and had 26 wounded, was then appointed
second-in-command of the “L’Immortalite”, she taken as a prize.

The Frenchman safely delivered, Fleming returned again to the “Fisgard” and we next
hear of them, still on patrol off Brest in 1800 where, on June 11 that year, they ‘cut out’ a
convoy of two ‘chassee marees’ and eight merchant ships, guarded by a French gunboat,
taking supplies in for the French fleet, the operation totally successful despite being also
under the fire of a heavy coastal battery and a constant fire of muskets from the shore and
too despite the forays of another three armed French boats.

Twelve days later, on the banks of the Quimper River, near the same point on the French
coast, Fleming contributed to the destruction of three shore-based batteries, each
mounting seven 24-pounder guns. Two parties of marines were landed, one on each bank
of the river to protect the boats from the “Fisgard”, the enemy retreating to ‘an
inaccessible distance’ up-river and the British then immediately landing, storming and
blowing up the shore batteries.

Then, on July 1, 1800, Fleming was instrumental in the destruction of five French ships
carrying 50 guns between them and fifteen other ships, laden with equally valuable
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cargoes, lying under the protection of six shore batteries and numerous flanking guns on
every projecting point of the island of Noirmoutier, in The Bay of Biscay.

On this occasion, Fleming and six other officers, together with 185 men, set off in the
ship’s boats soon after darkness fell and, by midnight, were encountering some very
formidable resistance as they tried to board the French ships. Despite all, Fleming and his
colleagues succeeded in securing all the ships but, deciding it was impossible to bring
them out of the anchorage on a rapidly falling tide, they set fire to them all to deny them
to their French enemy.

The Frenchmen, lying within the island, were also very near to the sands and, as Fleming
and the boats’ crews tried to head back out on the falling tide to the “Fisgard”, they
found themselves constantly bottoming on the sands and then, within another ten
minutes, stranding them under a constant rain of fire from the shore batteries and, to
make matters worse, Fleming’s men found a huge party of nearly 400 French soldiers
closing up on them from their rear.

Now, with no chance whatsoever of refloating the boats, Fleming’s inspiration was to make
yet another attack on another French boat, large enough to carry them all to safety,
which, rather challengingly, lay away from them on the opposite side of the bay and had
in the end to be dragged two miles across the sands before, the men themselves up to
their necks in water, she could be properly floated.

Despite the very precariousness of their position and four officers and eighty-eight men
being captured, a hundred men, including Fleming, returned safely to the anxiously
waiting “Fisgard” offshore and, as a consequence of his

resourcefulness in the action, John Fleming was given his Lieutenancy on October 2, 1800.
Three years later, in November 1803, he was wrecked off San Domingo in the 28-gun
“Garland”.

Now Fleming was appointed a Senior Lieutenant in the 74-gun “Theseus”, which had
carried Nelson’s flag in 1797 and, from the decks of the “Theseus”, Fleming witnessed
the surrender of the French squadron, with the remains of General Rochambeau’s army on
board from Cape Francois and, in the early part of 1804, Fleming too shared in the
unsuccessful attack on Curacao when engaged on The West Indies’ station.

Promoted First Lieutenant to the 36-gun “Franchise”, an eighteen-month assignment on

the opposite side of The Atlantic from the glories of Trafalgar, Fleming landed on Curacao
with a party of seamen and marines and destroyed several heavy shore-based gun
batteries before, in separate hard-wrought actions, capturing two French privateers.

Then, exactly eleven weeks to the day after Nelson’s great battle at Trafalgar, on January
6, 1806, the “Franchise”,
having learned from a neutral ship of the likely presence of some newly arrived Spanish
warships in the Bay of Campeachy, in The Gulf of Mexico, Fleming’s captain, Sir Charles
Dashwood, decided to take a risk and extend his patrol area so that he might, with what
he thought was but little risk, ‘cut out’ the Spanish ships.

The very shallowness of The Bay of Campeachy made it impossible for Fleming’s captain to
bring the deepish-draughted “Franchise” close inshore and, as darkness fell that night,
she anchored some five leagues offshore, in about four fathoms of water, abreast of the
town of Campeachy itself - For the record and for the curious, a league was in these days
understood to be equal to three nautical miles, 5.5695 kilometres.

With some fifteen or so miles to row in to the enemy, it was estimated that the 64 men in
the three ship’s boats would reach their objective around 4 o’clock in the morning, well
before the moon, now in the final days of its last quarter, would rise, but, due to the
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runnings of tide and currents, the boats were delayed and alert lookouts on the Spanish
enemy ships quickly spotted the approaches of the labouring boats in the receding moon’s
light.

Within minutes, the ten Spanish ships - two brigs, one of 20-guns with an 180-man crew,
the other of 12-guns with a 90-man crew; an 8-gun armed schooner and seven 2-gun
gunboats - had all slipped their anchor cables and commenced a most severe and heavy
carronading which might soon have sunk the three boats from the “Franchise”.

On a point of history, as all Scots should know from their schooldays, the ‘Carronades’
took their name by virtue of the fact that the first of their design of guns was produced by
Scotland’s ‘Carron Ironworks’ . First fitted to Royal Navy ships in 1779, these highly useful
guns had a maximum range of about 1,100 yards

Fleming, his boat under heavy attack from the smaller of the two brigs and quickly
followed by Lieutenant Peter John Douglas, in the barge and by Mr Lamb, in the ship’s
pinnace, boldly dashed onto and boarded the brig which, despite her crew’s powerful
resistance, they captured in secured within ten minutes of boarding her and the captured
brig added to the British boats, the little flotilla, under Fleming’s command, forced the
enemy to retreat into a corner of the bay and retire from the action. While five of the
Spaniards were killed and another twenty-six wounded, none of Fleming’s sixty-four men
were killed and only seven of them slightly wounded.

Fleming, his captain, Sir Charles Dashwood and their admiral, Admiral Dacres,
Commander-in-Chief at Jamaica, were well pleased with the brig’s capture for she, the “El
Raposa”, pierced for sixteen guns though only carrying twelve, turned out to be near
newly built and coppered (against worms) and, a good sailer, would make an admirable
addition to the navy’s fleet.

As an immediate consequence of his success, Fleming was ‘strongly commended’ by his

captain, Sir Charles Dashwood, for his ‘meritorious conduct’ and his ‘distinguished merit
and bravery’.

In later months, Fleming would be presented with a ‘sword of honour’ it, preserved in a
shark-skin sheath, its handle too fashioned from the tooth of a shark, was given the
following inscription on its blade - “From The Patriotic Fund at Lloyds to Lieut. Jno. Fleming
of H.M.S. Franchise, for his gallant and spirited conduct in boarding and carrying by the
boats of that ship, the Spanish Armed Brig Raposa, from under the fire of the Batteries and
Ships of the Enemy, in The Bay of Campeachy, on the 6th of January, 1806, as recorded in
the London Gazette of the 15th of April”.

After commanding the schooner “Decouverte” for a few months, Fleming was invested
with the acting command first of the sloop “Drake” and then of the “Bramble” and
serving in the Jamaica station until the summer of 1812 when he joined the 74-gun “San
Domingo”, she wearing the flag of Sir John Borlase Warren and stationed on the coast of
North America.

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Afterwards, in temporary command of a prize, Fleming effected several more captures and
was promoted to the command of the 16-gun sloop “Barbadose” in March 1813, his
appointment later confirmed by commission dated November 2, 1814 and, while in
command of her and yet again against some stout opposition, he captured four American
privateers with their 29 guns and 288 men.

Subsequently, in 1815, Fleming and his sloop covered the debarkation of troops at the
French West Indies island of Guadeloupe, Fleming then returning to England in May 1816 at
the age of 43 and shortly afterwards retiring from the navy on half-pay, he too having
already amassed a very considerable sum of prize money from his earlier successes in the
service.

On his return to Campbeltown, Fleming entered the Town Council in 1817 and began to buy
and build properties in the Longrow, Bolgam Street, Back Street, St. John’s Street and in
the town’s Main Street where his name is commemorated on the gable at The Royal Bank of
Scotland where the words “Fleming’s Land” is imposed above the entry and, as a town
house, Fleming, in 1823, acquired a 76-year lease and built ‘North Park’.

Five years earlier, in 1818, Fleming had purchased the lands that we can best refer to as
Muasdale and Glencreggan and at the same time he also bought a small estate on the
north shore of Loch Melfort, it described as “the toune and lands of Kilchoan, with the
island and mill thereof” and, at a later date, Fleming also became proprietor of ‘Drumore-
na-Bodoach’ at Bellochantuy.

Fleming, taking an active part in the town’s affairs, became a Baillie and was elected
Provost of The Burgh in 1832, the year in which the first gas street lights appeared in
Campbeltown. Retiring from the town council in 1836, after completing nineteen years in
office, Fleming continued to serve as a J.P., a Sheriff-Substitute for Kintyre and was, in the
last twenty years of his life, a Deputy-Lieutenant of Argyllshire.

He married twice, his first wife being Mary Campbell, daughter of Campbell of Islandree
and their daughter, Mary Jane, about 1841, marrying Smolett Montgomerie Eddington, at
that time a lieutenant in the 28th Regiment of Foot, better known in later time as Colonel
Eddington of Glencreggan, he dying in 1905 in his 89th year.

In 1848, at the age of 75, Fleming remarried, this time to Mary Smith, a daughter of the
Rev. John Smith, late of Campbeltown’s Highland Church - Mary would survive him by
twenty years and she died in Edinburgh on May 31, 1870. Fleming himself died on
February 23, 1849 - His tombstone, referred to in Charles Mactaggart’s paper “A Ramble
Through The Old Kilkerran Graveyard”, erroneously dating his death on ‘April 23, 1849’,
was surmounted with engravings of a ship, an anchor and a sword.

Eleven years after Fleming’s death, his estate’s trustees, with a number of life rents,
legacies and bequests still to settle, found it necessary to raise an action in the Court of
Session to authorise them to sell some of the heritable properties which Fleming’s will did
not empower them to realise.

Accordingly, in 1860, both ‘Drumore-na-Bodoach’ and the lands of Muasdale were placed
on the market and sold respectively to Robert Colvill and his son John, of Springside
Distillery. John Fleming himself had been a cousin of Campbeltown maltster John Colville.

Though today’s keeper of Fleming’s ‘sword of honour’ and its whereabouts are presently
unknown, it was in the possession of a Miss Eddington, a grand-daughter of Fleming, a
frequent visitor to Lauder, in The Scottish Borders, in the 1930’s and, the nation having
celebrated the 200th anniversary of Nelson’s victory at Trafalgar, it would indeed be fitting
to begin ‘searching for the sword’ and, if it is still in existence, seek permission to allow it
to be put on display in Campbeltown Museum to highlight Captain John Fleming’s place in
local and national history.
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 © 2005 P. Donald M. Kelly