president bade him tell his countrymen that he had found on the banks of the Seine a brave, susceptible, and generous people, formerly frivolous, but now enjoying liberty, especially as it gave them opportunities of rewarding virtue. Nesham must have reflected that if he had received the first civic wreath ever awarded in France, he would scarcely in any other country have had to defend an innocent man against a bloodthirsty mob.[1] He may have worn the sword at Camperdown.
The other future admiral, Henry (afterwards Sir Henry) Blackwood, whose mother became Lady Dufferin, had gone to Angoulême, when just of age, at the end of 1791, in order to learn French. In December 1792 he went to Paris, and agreed to take a bag, which he was assured contained no letters, but merely domestic articles for an émigré at Brussels. At Paris, however, the bag was searched, and letters were found in it. Blackwood was taken before the municipality; but as the letters did not touch on politics, he was released on bail, a Paris merchant with whom he stayed being surety for him. On January 13th, 1793, the Committee of Public Safety reported to the Convention that the letters had been
- ↑ Carlyle, following a newspaper misprint, gave the name as Needham, and spoke of the sword as "long since rusted into nothingness," but in 1854 Admiral Nesham's son corrected the mistake, adding that the sword was still preserved by him. For an accurate account of the rescue see Boivin Champeaux, "Révolution dans l'Eure." Nesham died in 1837.
