Chapter I.

John Irving, born in Princes Street, Edinburgh, on February 8, 1815, was the fourth son of the late Mr. John Irving, a much respected member of the Society of Writers to the Signet, who in his youth, and at the High School, was the intimate friend of Sir Walter Scott. This boyish congeniality is taken marked notice of in Lockhart’s Life of Scott, from which it may be gathered that Irving was a man of no commonplace mind and character. His elder brother, Alexander, Professor of Civil Law in the University, and ultimately Lord Newton, one of the Senators of the College of Justice, was an eminent mathematician, and at the same time a man of general culture.

The mother of John Irving, of whom we are about to write, was Agnes Hay, daughter of an eminent Engineer officer, Colonel Lewis Hay, who was killed in the expedition to the Helder in 1799. It is well known that Sir Ralph Abercromby made it a condition of his accepting the chief command in that expedition, that he should have the services of Colonel Hay, of whose professional skill and judgment he had already formed the highest opinion. We mention these facts regarding John Irving’s birth and parentage in connection with his subsequent career and character.

His mother was the great-granddaughter of Robert Craigie of Glendoick, President of the Court of Session, and previously Lord Advocate for Scotland during the Rebellion in 1745-6. She was a very excellent, godly woman, and had much influence, doubtless, in the early training of her son; but she died in 1823, when he was comparatively young.

He was eventually a scholar of the New Academy, Edinburgh, and joined it, we understand, on the day of its first opening. Some of his companions still have pleasant recollections of him. One of them, who often sat next him, mentions that he was a “nice fellow,” fond of play, with a good deal of quiet humour, courageous, but very slow to quarrel or take offence.

Evidently he did not remain at the New Academy during the usual term of seven years; for he entered the Royal Naval College at Portsmouth on June 25, 1828, and in 1830, when he would be only about fifteen, he gained the second mathematical prize at that institution. It was this very medal, discovered in a lonely grave within the Arctic circle, which, forty-nine years afterwards, led to the identification of his honoured remains.

Before proceeding further with John Irving’s naval career, we may give some account of the other members of the family. Six sons and one daughter grew up. 1. The eldest son, George, about ten years John’s senior, followed his father’s profession, and died, much esteemed, at a comparatively early age. 2. Lewis Hay, a man of talent and wide attainments, after spending some time in Geneva, with great advantage to his future life, under the roof of the late Rev. Dr. Cæsar Malan, studied for the ministry of the National Church of Scotland, and was settled at the age of twenty-four in the pleasant rural parish of Abercorn, near Queensferry, and continued to perform all his duties there, with remarkable zeal and energy, until the Disruption of the Church in 1843. Joining the Free Church, he was transferred to the town of Falkirk, where he laboured incessantly, with rare devotion, in the Master’s service, until the summer of 1877, when he died at the age of seventy. He resembled John in many respects, and was, we have often thought, fitted by nature, had God so ordained his course in life, for any enterprise demanding enthusiasm, self-denial, and undaunted energy. 3. Mary came next in the family. She married the Rev. William Scott Moncrieff, an esteemed minister of the Church of Scotland at Penicuik. She has survived him many years, and is the mother of two daughters and of Mr. William George Scott Moncrieff, advocate, who now fills the position of Sheriff at Banff with much reputation. 4. Alexander was the third son in this large household. He entered the Royal Artillery about the same time that his younger brother John commenced his studies for the Navy. He has served his Queen and her predecessor William IV. with distinction in various quarters of the globe; he took part in the Crimean war; he is a Companion of the Bath and a Major-General; and has been spared to act as chief mourner on the recent melancholy occasion. 5 and 6. The two remaining sons were Archibald and David. They were children when their devoted mother was taken away, and therefore had few of those advantages which the older members of the family enjoyed. Archibald died many years ago, leaving a widow, who still survives. David, whose early manhood, as we shall see, was specially brought under the influence of his sailor brother, is now a respected Police Magistrate in Australia.

John Irving, after leaving the Royal Naval College, in which, as we have seen, he distinguished himself, particularly in mathematics, joined for a short time the “Cordelia,” a 10-gun brig, under Commander Charles Hotham, in the North Sea. He then served as a midshipman from 1830 to 1833 in the “Belvidera” frigate, commanded by Captain the Hon. R. S. Dundas, on the Mediterranean station.

In the summer of 1831 his future intimate friend, William E. Malcolm, on joining the ship for the first time, found Irving already there, and also another friend, George Kingston. He too had been appointed midshipman in December of the previous year; and after a short leave of absence found Irving on board on his return to the “Belvidera” in January 1831. Irving, Kingston, and Malcolm were fellow-midshipmen in the same ship from the summer of 1831 onwards.

They were drawn much together, and became mutually helpful, from the circumstance that all three were already more or less deeply impressed with religious convictions, and had to maintain their position, as we can surmise, under no little discouragement, perhaps opposition, from some of their shipmates. These three youths were together for the greater part of three years. Malcolm left the “Belvidera” a little earlier than the others, when she came home bringing Lady Frances Hotham, whose husband, Sir Henry, had died as Admiral of the Mediterranean Fleet. The ship was paid off in December 1833, when Irving was appointed at once to the “Edinburgh,” then at Portsmouth under Captain Dacres. Kingston shortly after joined H.M. ship “Tyne,” fitting out for the Mediterranean; and thus the early and pleasant fellowship of the three young men virtually came to an end. Their several courses in life diverged; but an epistolary correspondence was maintained more or less steadily for many years.

Malcolm, a son of the eminent and well-known Admiral Sir Pulteney Malcolm, left the Navy on account of his health in the end of 1833. He still survives as the proprietor of Burnfoot in Dumfriesshire, and has kindly favoured us with a series of letters which will enable the reader to form an estimate of John Irving’s character, and also to trace clearly and satisfactorily the future current of his life during the ten or eleven years preceding his final departure in Sir John Franklin’s expedition to the Arctic regions.

Kingston is often mentioned in the letters to Malcolm; but those written to himself are unfortunately not within reach, having been left in Canada. It will interest the reader to know that that gentleman, after being invalided from the Navy in 1839, became, like Malcolm, a student at the University of Cambridge, where he took his degree in 1846, and some years afterwards was appointed Director of the Magnetic Observatory, Toronto, and Superintendent of the Meteorological service of the Dominion of Canada; he also held, until his final retirement in 1880, the Professorship of Meteorology in the University College, Toronto.

We may now, in a new chapter, introduce the first letter of the series addressed by John Irving to his friend Malcolm. It was evidently written in the short interval betwixt the paying off of the “Belvidera “ and his appointment as a midshipman on board the “Edinburgh.”