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Adventures of a Younger Son. By E.J. Trelawny. _With an Introduction by Edward Garnett._ Second Edition.
Robert Drury's Journal in Madagascar. _Edited, with an Introduction and Notes, by Captain S.P. Oliver._
Memoirs of the Extraordinary Military Career of John Shipp. _With an Introduction by H. Manners Chichester._
The Adventures of Thomas Pellow, of Penryn, Mariner. _Written by himself, and edited with an Introduction and Notes by Dr. Robert Brown._
MEMOIRS OF THE EXTRAORDINARY MILITARY CAREER OF JOHN SHIPP, LATE A LIEUT. IN HIS MAJESTY'S 87TH REGIMENT
WRITTEN BY HIMSELF. A NEW ILLUSTRATED EDITION. WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY H. MANNERS CHICHESTER
LONDON: T. FISHER UNWIN, PATERNOSTER SQUARE. MDCCCXC
(1) LIEUTENANT JOHN SHIPP _Frontispiece._
(4) EUROPEAN CAVALRY OF SHIPP'S DAY " 144
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 (_un_limited) 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.