Here lies interred the Body of CHARLES WATSON, ESQUIRE, Vice Admiral of the White, Commander in Chief of His Majesty’s Naval Forces in the East Indies, Who departed this life On the 16th day of August, 1757, In the 44th year of his age. _Geriah taken, February 13th, 1756. Calcutta freed, January 11th, 1757. Chandernagore taken, March 23rd, 1757._ Exegit monumentum aere perennius.
Monumentum aere perennius? Hardly that. Modern India has no place for naval memories. Clive—and Clive only—holds the field.
Hos ego versiculos feci: tulit alter honores
—wrote Virgil once, in a moment of literary bitterness. If it be given to those beyond the Veil to know of things on earth, and think, the Shade of the gallant admiral might well express itself in terms hardly less strong.
The East India Company erected a monument to the Admiral in Westminster Abbey, and King George bestowed a baronetcy of the United Kingdom on his only son—then a boy—in consideration of his father’s “great and eminent services.”
_Est procul hinc_—the legend’s writ, The frontier grave is far away, _Qui ante diem periit_ _Sed miles, sed Prô Patriâ_.
Is it too extravagant to suggest that, with things as they then were, with nearly five years of continuous war yet to come, and with enemies’ fleets in every sea, Admiral Watson, a man young in years for his high position,[7] might, had he been spared, have well found opportunity for achieving yet higher fame, even wider renown? His, too, in 1757, was surely in a real sense a “frontier grave”—the grave of one
Who might have caught and claspt Renown, And worn her chaplet here:—and there, In haunts of jungle-poisoned air, The flame of life went wavering down.
The flagship _Kent_, it so happened, did not long outlast her chief. She had for some time past shown signs of being nearly worn out, and an official survey of her, shortly after Admiral Watson’s death, resulted in her condemnation as unfit for sea. She was “cast” and ordered to be broken up, and on the 15th of September, a month all but a day from the death of her Admiral, the pennant was hauled down on board the _Kent_—still lying off Fort William—and the ship’s company were paid off and drafted into the _Cumberland_, _Tyger_, and _Salisbury_.