Monumentum aere perennius? Hardly that. Modern India has no place for naval memories. Clive—and Clive only—holds the field.

—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.”

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

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.

So with the passing of the Admiral and his ship our story reaches its end.

Chandernagore, of course, is nowadays a French possession, a tiny territory of three and a half square miles, with a railway station on the line to Calcutta, where very few people ever get out. It was restored to France six years after Admiral Watson took it, for no particular reason it would appear, except that there had been a General Election in England, and the new Ministry was desirous of reversing the policy of its predecessors. Our beaten enemies got back almost everything that the valour of our sailors and soldiers had won for England, in order that the Treasury Bench might score a point in party politics. But we for our part have no right to throw stones. We of the present day have seen much the same thing happen elsewhere. Chandernagore has been twice retaken since 1763, and twice given back. It was finally handed back to France in 1816, after the Napoleonic War, the Foreign Office being under the impression—so, at any rate, the story goes—that it was one of the West India islands!