Marryat, FREDERICK, was born in Westminster on July 10, 1792. He was the second son of Joseph Marryat, M.P. for Sandwich and colonial agent for the island of Grenada. In 1806 he went to sea as a midshipman under Captain Lord Cochrane on board the Impérieuse frigate. He spent some years of active and dangerous service under his famous captain on the north-west coasts of France, on the north coast of Spain, and in the Mediterranean, taking part in many of the incidents which he afterwards described in Frank Mildmay and Mr Midshipman Easy. 'The cruises of the Impérieuse,' he wrote in his private log, 'were periods of continued excitement from the hour in which she hove up her anchor till she dropped it again in port; the day that passed without a shot being fired in anger was with us a blank day; the boats were hardly secured on the booms than they were cast loose and out again.' After visiting West Indian waters in the Æolus and Spartan frigates he received a lieutenant's commission in 1812, and was soon after appointed to the sloop Espiègle, in which he cruised on the north coast of South America. He was twice invalided home, but was appointed commander at the age of twenty-three, in 1815, at the close of the great war. In 1819 he married Miss Shairp, the daughter of a Scotch gentleman, and was then appointed to the Beaver sloop, which was kept cruising off St Helena to guard against the escape of Napoleon. After doing good work in suppressing the channel smugglers in the Rosario he was sent out in command of the Larne to Burma, where his men suffered severely in river-work and stockade-fighting. On his return to England his services were rewarded by the Companionship of the Bath and the command of the Ariadne, of twenty-eight guns. He resigned in 1830 and never afterwards applied for a ship, but settled in Sussex House, Hammer-smith, and thenceforth led the life of a man of letters. Frank Mildmay, his first novel, appeared in 1829, and the King's Own in 1830. In 1832 he became editor of the Metropolitan Magazine, to which he contributed Newton Forster (1832), Peter Simple (1833), Jacob Faithful, Japhet in Search of a Father, and Mr Midshipman Easy (1834). After living for some time abroad he severed his connection with the Metropolitan Magazine, and wrote for the New Monthly at the rate of £20 a sheet. Snarley Yow and The Pasha of Many Tales came out in 1836, and in 1837 Marryat set out for a tour through the United States, where he remained for two years, and where he wrote The Phantom Ship (1839) and a drama, The Ocean Waif, which was produced at a New York theatre. His literary work was fairly remunerative: he received £1200 for Mr Midshipman Easy, £1600 for his Diary in America, and similar sums for his other books. But he was extravagant and unlucky in his speculations, and he lost heavily through his estate of Langham in Norfolk. During his later years his means were greatly narrowed, and his life seems to have been shortened by overwork. His Diary in America was issued in 1839, and was followed before the close of 1842 by Poor Jack, Masterman Ready, The Poacher, and Pereival Keene. In 1843 he settled on his Norfolk property, where he spent his days in farming and in writing stories for children. He published Settlers in Canada in 1844, The Mission in 1846, The Privateer's Man in 1846, and the Children of the New Forest in 1847. Valerie was only partly Marryat's; and Rattlin the Reefer, though included in the list of his novels, was written by E. Howard, his sub-editor on the Metropolitan Magazine. His health broke down in 1847, and, after rupturing several blood-vessels, he died at Langham on August 9, 1848. He was an excellent officer and a generous man, though quick-tempered, extravagant, and over-eager in the pursuit of enjoyment.
As a writer of sea-stories Marryat has no superior. He cannot, it may be, bring fully home to his readers the beauty and the terror of the deep. But for invention, narrative skill, and grasp of character, and especially for richness of humour, he stands first of all those who have dealt with the sea and sailors in prose fiction. No doubt his fun often descends to farce; still, setting Dickens aside, there is no English novelist who has awakened heartier and honester laughter. His happiest creations, Mr Chucks, for example, and Terence O'Brien, and Mr Easy and Mesty and Equality Jack would not unworthily fill places in the gallery of the greatest novelist. His best books are thoroughly sound in workmanship. They betray no sign of straining after effect; the prose is direct, clear, and vigorous, an ideal, in its way, of the narrative of adventure. Nothing, for example, could well be more vivid, yet nothing could well be simpler and more reserved in style, than such a passage as the club-hauling of the Diomede (in Peter Simple), where—as is usual in Marryat—the excitement and peril of the moment are brought home to you in the tersest phrase, by dramatic flashes and apt touches of dialogue. His sea-fights, his chases and cutting-out expeditions, are told with irresistible gusto. The writing is as unpretentious as it is spirited and truth-like. You have only to compare the action between the Rattlesnake and the three schooners (in Peter Simple), or the fight between the Aurora and the Trident (in Midshipman Easy), with Fenimore Cooper's attempts in the same line to be convinced of Marryat's immense superiority as an artist. His books have been the delight of boyhood since they first appeared; and you can turn to them in after years confident of a renewal of past enjoyment. The sailors of the Great War live in his pages as vividly as certain ranks and classes of Londoners live in the pages of Dickens.
See Life and Letters of Captain Marryat (1872), by his daughter Florence Marryat (1838-99), herself a prolific novelist; and the Life of Captain Marryat, by David Hannay ('Great Writers' series, 1889).