It is also recorded of Marryat that he ran away to sea three times, that is, he ran away with the intention of getting to sea, but the end of the adventure was always capture, return to school, and more cane. His great grievance is reported to have been the obligation to wear the clothes which his elder brother had outgrown. The detail seems to indicate a certain narrowness, not to say sordidness, in so prosperous a household as the Marryats’, and the aggravation was certainly gross enough to justify the protest. On one of these occasions Mr. J. Marryat showed a remarkable weakness. He gave the truant money and sent him in a carriage back to school. This error of judgment had a very natural consequence. Marryat slipped out of the carriage, found his way quietly home, and took his younger brothers to the theatre. At last his father came to the very sensible conclusion that the sea was the best place for such a boy. Being a man of some influence and position, he was able to start his son well, on board a crack frigate, and under a distinguished captain. In September, 1806, Marryat entered the _Impérieuse_, captain Lord Cochrane, and sailed for the Mediterranean.
Fortune could not have done Marryat a greater kindness than to send him to sea on the quarter-deck of the _Impérieuse_. She enabled him to share in the most stirring work to be done at the date at which he joined the service, and under the command of one the most brilliant of naval officers. In 1806 the war of fleets was over. Trafalgar had broken the heart of our enemies, and from that time forward their squadrons never even attempted to keep the sea. Napoleon built line-of-battle ships in batches, but only to keep them manned and armed, lying idle in port. The English fleets had so completely established their supremacy, that they used the French roadsteads as familiarly as their own. The blockading squadron off Brest anchored in Douarnenez Bay, in sight of the French lookout, and there repaired their rigging or caulked their seams as coolly as if no enemy’s fleet were in existence, and they did it with perfect impunity. Admiral Smyth has told how audaciously the Mediterranean fleet was wont to anchor off Hyères in the absolute confidence that the French would never come out of Toulon. Their only chance of service was when the French would be decoyed out by some particularly audacious frigate, which was sent in to insult them at the very mouth of their harbour. Then there was a chance that they might be drawn further than they could go back before the in-shore squadron was upon them. But such breaks in the monotony of blockade were rare. For the most part our line-of-battle ships were employed in cruising to and fro, with intervals of harbour--their officers and crews spent their lives in drilling aloft or at the guns, and in keeping decks and metal-work in a condition of faultless cleanliness. That passion for neatness and smartness which has never left the British navy rose to its height in the last years of the Great War, and did indeed sometimes attain to actual mania in the minds of captains and first lieutenants in want of something to employ themselves and their men upon.