During the ensuing peace, Mr. Wolfe served in the various ships commanded by Captains Herbert Sawyer, Charles Chamberlayne, Robert Fanshawe, Charles M. Pole, J. Smith, and Thomas Hicks.
In 1790, an explosion accidentally took place on board the Orion 74, Captain Chamberlayne, then at anchor in Carlisle Bay, Barbadoes. Mr. Wolfe was at that time confined to his bed by a fever, which had already carried off 23 men, and to which the Surgeon, who was an atheist, predicted he would also fall a victim in less than twenty-four hours. So great was the alarm among the crew, that many of the people jumped through the ports and were drowned. During the confusion, Mr. Wolfe’s cot was broken down, and as he lay on the deck, his ears were assailed by the dreadful cries of some who were drowning, and others in distress. Not relishing the idea of being burnt alive, he contrived to pull on his trowsers and crawl to the gun-room ports, where he saw the Surgeon hanging by the rudder chains, kicking and screaming most furiously, and holding out his purse as an inducement for a boat that had been sent to the Orion’s assistance, to come and save him from being devoured by the sharks: so much for the carelessness about futurity, of a person who denied the existence of a God, and attributed “surrounding nature and all its astonishing phoenomena to chance, or a fortuitous concourse of atoms[1].” Strengthened in an extraordinary manner by the fright to which he had been subjected, Mr. Wolfe managed to hand the poor wretch a rope’s end, by which he was enabled once more to obtain a firm footing on the Orion’s deck, and observe the recovery of his patient; the preservation of whose life may reasonably be attributed to his dormant pulse being suddenly roused into action by the terror excited in his breast, on hearing the appalling cry of “fire,” and witnessing the despair of his shipmates.
At the commencement of the French revolutionary war, Mr. Wolfe, who had passed his examination upwards of four years, joined the Windsor Castle, a second rate, bearing the flag of Rear-Admiral Cosby, with whom he soon after sailed
- ↑ See an account of the sect calling themselves atheists, in Evans’s Sketch of all Religions, p. 2, et seq.
