Rescues

Sir Edward and Lady Pellew were on their way to a dinner engagement one stormy day, when their carriage was caught up in tragedy at sea.

Edward Pellew (1757-1833), 1st Viscount Exmouth, served in the Royal Navy for fifty years, rising to the rank of Admiral and playing a leading role in the American Revolutionary War, the French Revolutionary Wars and the Napoleonic Wars. He is remembered for several acts of courage, such as the occasion when he rescued some five hundred passengers from a wreck off Plymouth Hoe during a violent storm.

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Mild-mannered Grace Darling persuaded her father to let her help him rescue the survivors of a shipwreck.

Grace Darling was just 22 when she helped her father rescue the survivors of a shipwreck on the Farne Islands off the Northumberland coast. It was a moment of instinctive heroism that would change her life forever.

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A young French cavalry soldier took a tremendous risk to rescue a drowning man.

Mathieu Martinel enrolled in the French army in January 1816, at the age of sixteen. It was a time of relative peace, but opportunities for heroism appeared to come looking for him.

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The soldier went quite deliberately into a burning room full of gunpowder and ammunition.

Mathieu Martinel was a cavalry soldier in the French army. At the age of twenty, he had already saved a fellow-soldier from drowning in the River Ill, but his heroic exploits were far from over.

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A firework display in Paris turned to tragedy in the narrow streets of the capital.

It is 1837, and Mathieu Martinel, a cavalry soldier in the French army, is now a senior officer in the military college in Paris. Fate, however, had not yet finished testing his mettle.

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The ten-year-old got away from a royal castle disguised as a bundle of hay.

William Longsword was the son of Rollo, a Viking who had made his home in northern France, much to the disgust of the French kings. William was murdered on December 17, 942, leaving a son named Richard.

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