p277-110 CHAPTER XXII. WASH-DAY, AND HOUSE-CLEANING IN A MAN-OF-WAR.

[figure description] Page 105.[end figure description]

Besides the other tribulations connected with your hammock,
you must keep it snow-white and clean; who has not
observed the long rows of spotless hammocks exposed in a frigate's
nettings, where, through the day, their outside, at least,
are kept airing?

Hence it comes that there are regular mornings appointed
for the scrubbing of hammocks; and such mornings are called
scrub-hammock-mornings; and desperate is the scrubbing
that ensues.

Before daylight the operation begins. All hands are called,
and at it they go. Every deck is spread with hammocks, fore
and aft; and lucky are you if you can get sufficient superficies
to spread your own hammock in. Down on their knees
are five hundred men, scrubbing away with brushes and
brooms; jostling, and crowding, and quarreling about using
each other's suds; when all their Purser's soap goes to create
one indiscriminate yeast.

Sometimes you discover that, in the dark, you have been
all the while scrubbing your next neighbor's hammock instead
of your own. But it is too late to begin over again; for now
the word is passed for every man to advance with his hammock,
that it may be tied to a net-like frame-work of clotheslines,
and hoisted aloft to dry.

That done, without delay you get together your frocks and
trowsers, and on the already flooded deck embark in the laundry
business. You have no special bucket or basin to yourself—
the ship being one vast wash-tub, where all hands wash
and rinse out, and rinse out and wash, till at last the word

[figure description] Page 106.[end figure description]

is passed again, to make fast your clothes, that they, also, may
be elevated to dry.

Then on all three decks the operation of holy-stoning begins,
so called from the queer name bestowed upon the principal
instruments employed. These are ponderous flat stones
with long ropes at each end, by which the stones are slidden
about, to and fro, over the wet and sanded decks; a most
wearisome, dog-like, galley-slave employment. For the by-ways
and corners about the masts and guns, smaller stones
are used, called prayer-books; inasmuch as the devout operator
has to down with them on his knees.

Finally, a grand flooding takes place, and the decks are
remorselessly thrashed with dry swabs. After which an extraordinary
implement—a sort of leathern hoe called a “squilgee”—
is used to scrape and squeeze the last dribblings of water
from the planks. Concerning this “squilgee,” I think something
of drawing up a memoir, and reading it before the
Academy of Arts and Sciences. It is a most curious affair.

By the time all these operations are concluded it is eight
bells, and all hands are piped to breakfast upon the damp and
every-way disagreeable decks.

Now, against this invariable daily flooding of the three decks
of a frigate, as a man-of-war's-man, White-Jacket most earnestly
protests. In sunless weather it keeps the sailor's quarters
perpetually damp; so much so, that you can scarce sit
down without running the risk of getting the lumbago. One
rheumatic old sheet-anchor-man among us was driven to the
extremity of sewing a piece of tarred canvas on the seat of his
trowsers.

Let those neat and tidy officers who so love to see a ship kept
spick and span clean; who institute vigorous search after the
man who chances to drop the crumb of a biscuit on deck,
when the ship is rolling in a sea-way; let all such swing their
hammocks with the sailors, and they would soon get sick of
this daily damping of the decks.

Is a ship a wooden platter, that it is to be scrubbed out

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every morning before breakfast, even if the thermometer be at
zero, and every sailor goes barefooted through the flood with
the chilblains? And all the while the ship carries a doctor,
well aware of Boerhaave's great maxim “keep the feet dry.”
He has plenty of pills to give you when you are down with
a fever, the consequences of these things; but enters no protest
at the outset—as it is his duty to do—against the cause
that induces the fever.

During the pleasant night watches, the promenading officers,
mounted on their high-heeled boots, pass dry-shod, like
the Israelites, over the decks; but by daybreak the roaring
tide sets back, and the poor sailors are almost overwhelmed
in it, like the Egyptians in the Red Sea.

Oh! the chills, colds, and agues that are caught. No snug
stove, grate, or fire-place to go to; no, your only way to keep
warm is to keep in a blazing passion, and anathematize the
custom that every morning makes a wash-house of a man-of-war.

Look at it. Say you go on board a line-of-battle-ship: you
see every thing scrupulously neat; you see all the decks clear
and unobstructed as the sidewalks of Wall Street of a Sunday
morning; you see no trace of a sailor's dormitory; you marvel
by what magic all this is brought about. And well you
may. For consider, that in this unobstructed fabric nearly
one thousand mortal men have to sleep, eat, wash, dress, cook,
and perform all the ordinary functions of humanity. The same
number of men ashore would expand themselves into a township.
Is it credible, then, that this extraordinary neatness,
and especially this unobstructedness of a man-of-war, can be
brought about, except by the most rigorous edicts, and a very
serious sacrifice, with respect to the sailors, of the domestic
comforts of life? To be sure, sailors themselves do not often
complain of these things; they are used to them; but man
can become used even to the hardest usage. And it is because
he is used to it, that sometimes he does not complain of it.

Of all men-of-war, the American ships are the most

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excessively neat, and have the greatest reputation for it. And of
all men-of-war the general discipline of the American ships is
the most arbitrary.

In the English navy, the men liberally mess on tables,
which, between meals, are triced up out of the way. The
American sailors mess on the deck, and peck up their broken
biscuit, or midshipmen's nuts, like fowls in a barn-yard.

But if this unobstructedness in an American fighting-ship
be, at all hazards, so desirable, why not imitate the Turks?
In the Turkish navy they have no mess-chests; the sailors
roll their mess things up in a rug, and thrust them under a
gun. Nor do they have any hammocks; they sleep any where
about the decks in their gregoes. Indeed, come to look at it,
what more does a man-of-war's-man absolutely require to live
in than his own skin? That's room enough; and room
enough to turn in, if he but knew how to shift his spine, end
for end, like a ramrod, without disturbing his next neighbor.

Among all men-of-war's-men, it is a maxim that over-neat
vessels are Tartars to the crew; and perhaps it may be safely
laid down that, when you see such a ship, some sort of tyranny
is not very far off.

In the Neversink, as in other national ships, the business
of holy-stoning the decks was often prolonged, by way of punishment
to the men, particularly of a raw, cold morning.
This is one of the punishments which a lieutenant of the
watch may easily inflict upon the crew, without infringing the
statute which places the power of punishment solely in the
hands of the Captain.

The abhorrence which men-of-war's-men have for this protracted
holy-stoning in cold, comfortless weather—with their
bare feet exposed to the splashing inundations—is shown in a
strange story, rife among them, curiously tinctured with their
proverbial superstitions.

The First Lieutenant of an English sloop of war, a severe
disciplinarian, was uncommonly particular concerning the
whiteness of the quarter-deck. One bitter winter morning at

[figure description] Page 109.[end figure description]

sea, when the crew had washed that part of the vessel, as
usual, and put away their holy-stones, this officer came on
deck, and after inspecting it, ordered the holy-stones and prayer-books
up again. Once more slipping off the shoes from their
frosted feet, and rolling up their trowsers, the crew kneeled
down to their task; and in that suppliant posture, silently invoked
a curse upon their tyrant; praying, as he went below,
that he might never more come out of the ward-room alive.
The prayer seemed answered; for being shortly after visited
with a paralytic stroke at his breakfast-table, the First Lieutenant
next morning was carried out of the ward-room feet
foremost, dead. As they dropped him over the side—so goes
the story—the marine sentry at the gangway turned his back
upon the corpse.

To the credit of the humane and sensible portion of the roll
of American navy-captains, be it added, that they are not so
particular in keeping the decks spotless at all times, and in all
weathers; nor do they torment the men with scraping brightwood
and polishing ring-bolts; but give all such gingerbreadwork
a hearty coat of black paint, which looks more warlike,
is a better preservative, and exempts the sailors from a perpetual
annoyance.

p277-115 CHAPTER XXIII. THEATRICALS IN A MAN-OF-WAR.

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The Neversink had summered out her last Christmas on
the Equator; she was now destined to winter out the Fourth
of July not very far from the frigid latitudes of Cape Horn.

It is sometimes the custom in the American Navy to celebrate
this national holiday by doubling the allowance of spirits
to the men; that is, if the ship happen to be lying in harbor.
The effects of this patriotic plan may be easily imagined:
the whole ship is converted into a dram-shop; and the intoxicated
sailors reel about, on all three decks, singing, howling,
and fighting. This is the time that, owing to the relaxed discipline
of the ship, old and almost forgotten quarrels are revived,
under the stimulus of drink; and, fencing themselves up
between the guns—so as to be sure of a clear space with at
least three walls—the combatants, two and two, fight out
their hate, cribbed and cabined like soldiers dueling in a sentry-box.
In a word, scenes ensue which would not for a single
instant be tolerated by the officers upon any other occasion.
This is the time that the most venerable of quarter-gunners
and quarter-masters, together with the smallest apprentice
boys, and men never known to have been previously
intoxicated during the cruise—this is the time that they all
roll together in the same muddy trough of drunkenness.

In emulation of the potentates of the Middle Ages, some
Captains augment the din by authorizing a grand jail-delivery
of all the prisoners who, on that auspicious Fourth of the
month, may happen to be confined in the ship's prison—“the
brig.”

But from scenes like these the Neversink was happily

[figure description] Page 111.[end figure description]

delivered. Besides that she was now approaching a most perilous
part of the ocean—which would have made it madness to
intoxicate the sailors—her complete destitution of grog, even
for ordinary consumption, was an obstacle altogether insuperable,
even had the Captain felt disposed to indulge his manof-war's-men
by the most copious libations.

For several days previous to the advent of the holiday, frequent
conferences were held on the gun-deck touching the
melancholy prospects before the ship.

“Too bad—too bad!” cried a top-man. “Think of it,
shipmates—a Fourth of July without grog!”

“I'll hoist the Commodore's pennant at half-mast that day,”
sighed the signal-quarter-master.

“And I'll turn my best uniform jacket wrong side out, to
keep company with the pennant, old Ensign,” sympathetically
responded an after-guard's-man.

“Ay, do!” cried a forecastle-man. “I could almost pipe
my eye to think on't.”

“No grog on de day dat tried men's souls!” blubbered
Sunshine, the galley-cook.

“Who would be a Jankee now?” roared a Hollander of
the fore-top, more Dutch than sour-crout.

“Is this the riglar fruits of liberty?” touchingly inquired
an Irish waister of an old Spanish sheet-anchor-man.

You will generally observe that, of all Americans, your
foreign-born citizens are the most patriotic—especially toward
the Fourth of July.

But how could Captain Claret, the father of his crew,
behold the grief of his ocean children with indifference? He
could not. Three days before the anniversary—it still continuing
very pleasant weather for these latitudes—it was
publicly announced that free permission was given to the
sailors to get up any sort of theatricals they desired, wherewith
to honor the Fourth.

Now, some weeks prior to the Neversink's sailing from
home—nearly three years before the time here spoken of—

[figure description] Page 112.[end figure description]

some of the seamen had clubbed together, and made up a
considerable purse, for the purpose of purchasing a theatrical
outfit; having in view to diversify the monotony of lying in
foreign harbors for weeks together, by an occasional display
on the boards—though if ever there was a continual theatre
in the world, playing by night and by day, and without intervals
between the acts, a man-of-war is that theatre, and
her planks are the boards indeed.

The sailors who originated this scheme had served in other
American frigates, where the privilege of having theatricals
was allowed to the crew. What was their chagrin, then,
when, upon making an application to the Captain, in a Peruvian
harbor, for permission to present the much-admired
drama of “The Ruffian Boy,” under the Captain's personal
patronage, that dignitary assured them that there were already
enough ruffian boys on board, without conjuring up
any more from the green-room.

The theatrical outfit, therefore, was stowed down in the
bottom of the sailors' bags, who little anticipated then that it
would ever be dragged out while Captain Claret had the sway.

But immediately upon the announcement that the embargo
was removed, vigorous preparations were at once commenced
to celebrate the Fourth with unwonted spirit. The
half-deck was set apart for the theatre, and the signal-quarter-master
was commanded to loan his flags to decorate it in the
most patriotic style.

As the stage-struck portion of the crew had frequently
during the cruise rehearsed portions of various plays, to while
away the tedium of the night-watches, they needed no long
time now to perfect themselves in their parts.

Accordingly, on the very next morning after the indulgence
had been granted by the Captain, the following written
placard, presenting a broadside of staring capitals, was found
tacked against the main-mast on the gun-deck. It was as
if a Drury-Lane bill had been posted upon the London Monument:

[figure description] Page 113.[end figure description]

Grand Celebration of the Fourth of July.

DAY PERFORMANCE.

UNCOMMON ATTRACTION.

THE OLD WAGON PAID OFF!

JACK CHASE..... PERCY ROYAL-MAST.

STARS OF THE FIRST MAGNITUDE.

For this time only,
THE TRUE YANKEE SAILOR.

The managers of the Cape Horn Theatre beg leave to inform
the inhabitants of the Pacific and Southern Oceans that,
on the afternoon of the Fourth of July, 184—, they will have
the honor to present the admired drama of

THE OLD WAGON PAID OFF!

Commodore Bougee..... Tom Brown, of the Fore-top.

Captain Spy-glass..... Ned Brace, of the After-Guard.

Commodore's Cockswain..Joe Bunk, of the Launch.

Old Luff..... Quarter-master Coffin.

Mayor..... Seafull, of the Forecastle.

Percy Royal-Mast..... Jack Chase.

Mrs. Lovelorn..... Long-locks, of the After-Guard.

Toddy Moll..... Frank Jones.

Gin and Sugar Sall..... Dick Dash.

Sailors, Marines, Bar-keepers, Crimps, Aldermen, Police-officers,
Soldiers, Landsmen generally.

Long live the Commodore! &verbar2; Admission Free.

To conclude with the much-admired song by Dibdin, altered
to suit all American Tars, entitled

THE TRUE YANKEE SAILOR.

True Yankee Sailor (in costume), Patrick Flinegan, Captain
of the Head.

[figure description] Page 114.[end figure description]

Performance to commence with “Hail Columbia,” by the
Brass Band. Ensign rises at three bells, P.M. No sailor
permitted to enter in his shirt-sleeves. Good order is expected
to be maintained. The Master-at-arms and Ship's Corporals
to be in attendance to keep the peace.

At the earnest entreaties of the seamen, Lemsford, the gun-deck
poet, had been prevailed upon to draw up this bill. And
upon this one occasion his literary abilities were far from being
underrated, even by the least intellectual person on board.
Nor must it be omitted that, before the bill was placarded,
Captain Claret, enacting the part of censor and grand chamberlain,
ran over a manuscript copy of “The Old Wagon
Paid Off,” to see whether it contained any thing calculated
to breed disaffection against lawful authority among the crew.
He objected to some parts, but in the end let them all pass.

The morning of The Fourth—most anxiously awaited—
dawned clear and fair. The breeze was steady; the air
bracing cold; and one and all the sailors anticipated a gleeful
afternoon. And thus was falsified the prophecies of certain
old growlers averse to theatricals, who had predicted a
gale of wind that would quash all the arrangements of the
green-room.

As the men whose regular turns, at the time of the performance,
would come round to be stationed in the tops, and
at the various halyards and running ropes about the spar-deck,
could not be permitted to partake in the celebration,
there accordingly ensued, during the morning, many amusing
scenes of tars who were anxious to procure substitutes at
their posts. Through the day, many anxious glances were
cast to windward; but the weather still promised fair.

At last the people were piped to dinner; two bells struck;
and soon after, all who could be spared from their stations
hurried to the half-deck. The capstan bars were placed on
shot-boxes, as at prayers on Sundays, furnishing seats for the
audience, while a low stage, rigged by the carpenter's gang,

[figure description] Page 115.[end figure description]

was built at one end of the open space. The curtain was
composed of a large ensign, and the bulwarks round about
were draperied with the flags of all nations. The ten or
twelve members of the brass band were ranged in a row at
the foot of the stage, their polished instruments in their hands,
while the consequential Captain of the Band himself was elevated
upon a gun-carriage.

At three bells precisely a group of ward-room officers
emerged from the after-hatchway, and seated themselves upon
camp-stools, in a central position, with the stars and stripes
for a canopy. That was the royal box. The sailors looked
round for the Commodore; but neither Commodore nor Captain
honored the people with their presence.

At the call of a bugle the band struck up Hail Columbia,
the whole audience keeping time, as at Drury Lane, when
God Save the King is played after a great national victory.

At the discharge of a marine's musket the curtain rose, and
four sailors, in the picturesque garb of Maltese mariners, staggered
on the stage in a feigned state of intoxication. The
truthfulness of the representation was much heightened by the
roll of the ship.

“The Commodore,” “Old Luff,” “The Mayor,” and “Gin
and Sugar Sall,” were played to admiration, and received
great applause. But at the first appearance of that universal
favorite, Jack Chase, in the chivalric character of “Percy
Royal-Mast,” the whole audience simultaneously rose to their
feet, and greeted him with three hearty cheers, that almost
took the main-top-sail aback.

Matchless Jack, in full fig, bowed again and again, with
true quarter-deck grace and self-possession; and when five or
six untwisted strands of rope and bunches of oakum were
thrown to him, as substitutes for bouquets, he took them one by
one, and gallantly hung them from the buttons of his jacket.

“Hurrah! hurrah! hurrah!—go on! go on!—stop hollering—
hurrah!—go on!—stop hollering—hurrah!” was now
heard on all sides, till at last, seeing no end to the enthusiasm

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of his ardent admirers, Matchless Jack stepped forward, and,
with his lips moving in pantomime, plunged into the thick of
the part. Silence soon followed, but was fifty times broken
by uncontrollable bursts of applause. At length, when that
heart-thrilling scene came on, where Percy Royal-Mast rescues
fifteen oppressed sailors from the watch-house, in the teeth
of a posse of constables, the audience leaped to their feet, overturned
the capstan bars, and to a man hurled their hats on
the stage in a delirium of delight. Ah Jack, that was a tenstroke
indeed!

The commotion was now terrific; all discipline seemed
gone forever; the Lieutenants ran in among the men, the
Captain darted from his cabin, and the Commodore nervously
questioned the armed sentry at his door as to what the deuce
the people were about. In the midst of all this, the trumpet
of the officer-of-the-deck, commanding the top-gallant sails to
be taken in, was almost completely drowned. A black squall
was coming down on the weather-bow, and the boatswain's
mates bellowed themselves hoarse at the main-hatchway.
There is no knowing what would have ensued, had not the
bass drum suddenly been heard, calling all hands to quarters,
a summons not to be withstood. The sailors pricked their
ears at it, as horses at the sound of a cracking whip, and confusedly
stumbled up the ladders to their stations. The next
moment all was silent but the wind, howling like a thousand
devils in the cordage.

“Stand by to reef all three top-sails!—settle away the halyards!—
haul out—so: make fast!—aloft, top-men! and reef
away!”

Thus, in storm and tempest terminated that day's theatricals.
But the sailors never recovered from the disappointment
of not having the “True Yankee Sailor” sung by the
Irish Captain of the Head.

And here White-Jacket must moralize a bit. The unwonted
spectacle of the row of gun-room officers mingling with
“the people” in applauding a mere seaman like Jack Chase,

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filled me at the time with the most pleasurable emotions. It
is a sweet thing, thought I, to see these officers confess a human
brotherhood with us, after all; a sweet thing to mark
their cordial appreciation of the manly merits of my matchless
Jack. Ah! they are noble fellows all round, and I do not
know but I have wronged them sometimes in my thoughts.

Nor was it without similar pleasurable feelings that I witnessed
the temporary rupture of the ship's stern discipline, consequent
upon the tumult of the theatricals. I thought to myself,
this now is as it should be. It is good to shake off, now
and then, this iron yoke round our necks. And after having
once permitted us sailors to be a little noisy, in a harmless
way—somewhat merrily turbulent—the officers can not, with
any good grace, be so excessively stern and unyielding as before.
I began to think a man-of-war a man-of-peace-and-good-will,
after all. But, alas! disappointment came.

Next morning the same old scene was enacted at the gang-way.
And beholding the row of uncompromising-looking
officers there assembled with the Captain, to witness punishment—
the same officers who had been so cheerfully disposed
over night—an old sailor touched my shoulder, and said, “See,
White-Jacket, all round they have shipped their quarter-deck
faces again. But this is the way.”

I afterward learned that this was an old man-of-war's-man's
phrase, expressive of the facility with which a sea-officer falls
back upon all the severity of his dignity, after a temporary
suspension of it.

p277-123 CHAPTER XXIV. INTRODUCTORY TO CAPE HORN.

[figure description] Page 118.[end figure description]

And now, through drizzling fogs and vapors, and under
damp, double-reefed top-sails, our wet-decked frigate drew
nearer and nearer to the squally Cape.

Who has not heard of it? Cape Horn, Cape Horn—a
horn indeed, that has tossed many a good ship. Was the descent
of Orpheus, Ulysses, or Dante into Hell, one whit more
hardy and sublime than the first navigator's weathering of
that terrible Cape?

Turned on her heel by a fierce West Wind, many an outward-bound
ship has been driven across the Southern Ocean
to the Cape of Good Hope—that way to seek a passage to the
Pacific. And that stormy Cape, I doubt not, has sent many
a fine craft to the bottom, and told no tales. At those ends
of the earth are no chronicles. What signify the broken spars
and shrouds that, day after day, are driven before the prows
of more fortunate vessels? or the tall masts, imbedded in icebergs,
that are found floating by? They but hint the old
story—of ships that have sailed from their ports, and never
more have been heard of.

Impracticable Cape! You may approach it from this direction
or that—in any way you please—from the East, or from
the West; with the wind astern, or abeam, or on the quarter;
and still Cape Horn is Cape Horn. Cape Horn it is
that takes the conceit out of fresh-water sailors, and steeps in
a still salter brine the saltest. Woe betide the tyro; the foolhardy,
Heaven preserve!

Your Mediterranean captain, who with a cargo of oranges
has hitherto made merry runs across the Atlantic, without so
much as furling a t'-gallant-sail, oftentimes, off Cape Horn,

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receives a lesson which he carries to the grave; though the
grave—as is too often the case—follows so hard on the lesson
that no benefit comes from the experience.

Other strangers who draw nigh to this Patagonia termination
of our Continent, with their souls full of its shipwrecks
and disasters—top-sails cautiously reefed, and every thing
guardedly snug—these strangers at first unexpectedly encountering
a tolerably smooth sea, rashly conclude that the Cape,
after all, is but a bugbear; they have been imposed upon by
fables, and founderings and sinkings hereabouts are all cock-and-bull
stories.

“Out reefs, my hearties; fore and aft set t'-gallant-sails!
stand by to give her the fore-top-mast stun'-sail!”

But, Captain Rash, those sails of yours were much safer in
the sail-maker's loft. For now, while the heedless craft is
bounding over the billows, a black cloud rises out of the sea;
the sun drops down from the sky; a horrible mist far and
wide spreads over the water.

“Hands by the halyards! Let go! Clew up!”

Too late.

For ere the ropes' ends can be cast off from the pins, the
tornado is blowing down to the bottom of their throats. The
masts are willows, the sails ribbons, the cordage wool; the
whole ship is brewed into the yeast of the gale.

And now, if, when the first green sea breaks over him, Captain
Rash is not swept overboard, he has his hands full, be
sure. In all probability his three masts have gone by the
board, and, raveled into list, his sails are floating in the air.
Or, perhaps, the ship broaches to, or is brought by the lee. In
either case, Heaven help the sailors, their wives, and their
little ones; and Heaven help the underwriters.

Familiarity with danger makes a brave man braver, but
less daring. Thus with seamen: he who goes the oftenest
round Cape Horn goes the most circumspectly. A veteran
mariner is never deceived by the treacherous breezes which
sometimes waft him pleasantly toward the latitude of the

[figure description] Page 120.[end figure description]

Cape. No sooner does he come within a certain distance of it—
previously fixed in his own mind—than all hands are turned to
setting the ship in storm-trim; and, never mind how light the
breeze, down come his t'-gallant-yards. He “bends” his strongest
storm-sails, and lashes every thing on deck securely. The
ship is then ready for the worst; and if, in reeling round the
headland, she receives a broadside, it generally goes well with
her. If ill, all hands go to the bottom with quiet consciences.

Among sea-captains, there are some who seem to regard the
genius of the Cape as a willful, capricious jade, that must be
courted and coaxed into complaisance. First, they come
along under easy sail; do not steer boldly for the headland,
but tack this way and that—sidling up to it. Now they woo
the Jezebel with a t'-gallant-studding-sail; anon, they deprecate
her wrath with double-reefed-top-sails. When, at length,
her unappeasable fury is fairly aroused, and all round the dismantled
ship the storm howls and howls for days together,
they still persevere in their efforts. First, they try unconditional
submission; furling every rag and heaving to; laying
like a log, for the tempest to toss wheresoever it pleases.

This failing, they set a spencer or try-sail, and shift on the
other tack. Equally vain! The gale sings as hoarsely as
before. At last, the wind comes round fair; they drop the
fore-sail; square the yards, and scud before it: their implacable
foe chasing them with tornadoes, as if to show her insensibility
to the last.

Other ships, without encountering these terrible gales, spend
week after week endeavoring to turn this boisterous world-corner
against a continual head-wind. Tacking hither and
thither, in the language of sailors, they polish the Cape by
beating about its edges so long.

Le Mair and Schouten, two Dutchmen, were the first navigators
who weathered Cape Horn. Previous to this, passages
had been made to the Pacific by the Straits of Magellan;
nor, indeed, at that period, was it known to a certainty that
there was any other route, or that the land now called Terra

[figure description] Page 121.[end figure description]

Del Fuego was an island. A few leagues southward from
Terra Del Fuego is a cluster of small islands, the Diegoes;
between which and the former island are the Straits of Le
Mair, so called in honor of their discoverer, who first sailed
through them into the Pacific. Le Mair and Schouten, in
their small, clumsy vessels, encountered a series of tremendous
gales, the prelude to the long train of similar hardships which
most of their followers have experienced. It is a significant
fact, that Schouten's vessel, the Horne, which gave its name
to the Cape, was almost lost in weathering it.

The next navigator round the Cape was Sir Francis Drake,
who, on Raleigh's Expedition, beholding for the first time,
from the Isthmus of Darien, the “goodlie South Sea,” like a
true-born Englishman, vowed, please God, to sail an English
ship thereon; which the gallant sailor did, to the sore discomfiture
of the Spaniards on the coasts of Chili and Peru.

But perhaps the greatest hardships on record, in making
this celebrated passage, were those experienced by Lord Anson's
squadron in 1736. Three remarkable and most interesting
narratives record their disasters and sufferings. The
first, jointly written by the carpenter and gunner of the
Wager; the second, by young Byron, a midshipman in the
same ship; the third, by the chaplain of the Centurion.
White-Jacket has them all; and they are fine reading of a
boisterous March night, with the casement rattling in your
ear, and the chimney-stacks blowing down upon the pavement,
bubbling with rain-drops.

But if you want the best idea of Cape Horn, get my friend
Dana's unmatchable “Two Years Before the Mast.” But
you can read, and so you must have read it. His chapters
describing Cape Horn must have been written with an icicle.

At the present day the horrors of the Cape have somewhat
abated. This is owing to a growing familiarity with it; but,
more than all, to the improved condition of ships in all respects,
and the means now generally in use of preserving the
health of the crews in times of severe and prolonged exposure.

p277-127 CHAPTER XXV. THE DOG-DAYS OFF CAPE HORN.

[figure description] Page 122.[end figure description]

Colder and colder; we are drawing nigh to the Cape.
Now gregoes, pea jackets, monkey jackets, reefing jackets,
storm jackets, oil jackets, paint jackets, round jackets, short
jackets, long jackets, and all manner of jackets, are the order
of the day, not excepting the immortal white jacket, which
begins to be sturdily buttoned up to the throat, and pulled
down vigorously at the skirts, to bring them well over the
loins.

But, alas! those skirts were lamentably scanty; and though,
with its quiltings, the jacket was stuffed out about the breasts
like a Christmas turkey, and of a dry cold day kept the
wearer warm enough in that vicinity, yet about the loins it
was shorter than a ballet-dancer's skirts; so that while my
chest was in the temperate zone, close adjoining the torrid,
my hapless thighs were in Nova Zembla, hardly an icicle's
toss from the Pole.

Then, again, the repeated soakings and dryings it had undergone,
had by this time made it shrink woefully all over,
especially in the arms, so that the wristbands had gradually
crawled up near to the elbows; and it required an energetic
thrust to push the arm through, in drawing the jacket on.

I endeavored to amend these misfortunes by sewing a sort
of canvass ruffle round the skirts, by way of a continuation or
supplement to the original work, and by doing the same with
the wristbands.

This is the time for oil-skin suits, dread-naughts, tarred
trowsers and overalls, sea-boots, comforters, mittens, woolen
socks, Guernsey frocks, Havre shirts, buffalo-robe shirts, and

[figure description] Page 123.[end figure description]

moose-skin drawers. Every man's jacket is his wigwam,
and every man's hat his caboose.

Perfect license is now permitted to the men respecting
their clothing. Whatever they can rake and scrape together
they put on—swaddling themselves in old sails, and drawing
old socks over their heads for night-caps. This is the time
for smiting your chest with your hand, and talking loud to
keep up the circulation.

Colder, and colder, and colder, till at last we spoke a fleet
of icebergs bound North. After that, it was one incessant
“cold snap,” that almost snapped off our fingers and toes.
Cold! It was cold as Blue Flujin, where sailors say fire
freezes.

And now coming up with the latitude of the Cape, we
stood southward to give it a wide berth, and while so doing
were becalmed; ay, becalmed off Cape Horn, which is worse,
far worse, than being becalmed on the Line.

Here we lay forty-eight hours, during which the cold was
intense. I wondered at the liquid sea, which refused to
freeze in such a temperature. The clear, cold sky overhead
looked like a steel-blue cymbal, that might ring, could you
smite it. Our breath came and went like puffs of smoke
from pipe-bowls. At first there was a long, gauky swell,
that obliged us to furl most of the sails, and even send down
t'-gallant-yards, for fear of pitching them overboard.

Out of sight of land, at this extremity of both the inhabitable
and uninhabitable world, our peopled frigate, echoing
with the voices of men, the bleating of lambs, the cackling
of fowls, the gruntings of pigs, seemed like Noah's old ark
itself, becalmed at the climax of the Deluge.

There was nothing to be done but patiently to await the
pleasure of the elements, and “whistle for a wind,” the usual
practice of seamen in a calm. No fire was allowed, except
for the indispensable purpose of cooking, and heating bottles
of water to toast Selvagee's feet. He who possessed the
largest stock of vitality, stood the best chance to escape

[figure description] Page 124.[end figure description]

freezing. It was horrifying. In such weather any man could
have undergone amputation with great ease, and helped take
up the arteries himself.

Indeed, this state of affairs had not lasted quite twenty-four
hours, when the extreme frigidity of the air, united to
our increased tendency to inactivity, would very soon have
rendered some of us subjects for the surgeon and his mates,
had not a humane proceeding of the Captain suddenly impelled
us to vigorous exercise.

And here be it said, that the appearance of the Boatswain,
with his silver whistle to his mouth, at the main hatchway
of the gun-deck, is always regarded by the crew with the
utmost curiosity, for this betokens that some general order is
about to be promulgated through the ship. What now? is
the question that runs on from man to man. A short preliminary
whistle is then given by “Old Yarn,” as they call
him, which whistle serves to collect round him, from their
various stations, his four mates. Then Yarn, or Pipes, as
leader of the orchestra, begins a peculiar call, in which his
assistants join. This over, the order, whatever it may be,
is loudly sung out and prolonged, till the remotest corner
echoes again. The Boatswain and his mates are the towncriers
of a man-of-war.

The calm had commenced in the afternoon; and the following
morning the ship's company were electrified by a general
order, thus set forth and declared: “D'ye hear there,
fore and aft! all hands skylark!”

This mandate, nowadays never used except upon very rare
occasions, produced the same effect upon the men that Exhilarating
Gas would have done, or an extra allowance of “grog.”
For a time, the wonted discipline of the ship was broken
through, and perfect license allowed. It was a Babel here, a
Bedlam there, and a Pandemonium every where. The Theatricals
were nothing compared with it. Then the fainthearted
and timorous crawled to their hiding-places, and the
lusty and bold shouted forth their glee. Gangs of men, in all

[figure description] Page 125.[end figure description]

sorts of outlandish habiliments, wild as those worn at some
crazy carnival, rushed to and fro, seizing upon whomsoever
they pleased—warrant-officers and dangerous pugilists excepted—
pulling and hauling the luckless tars about, till fairly
baited into a genial warmth. Some were made fast to, and
hoisted aloft with a will; others, mounted upon oars, were
ridden fore and aft on a rail, to the boisterous mirth of the
spectators, any one of whom might be the next victim.
Swings were rigged from the tops, or the masts; and the most
reluctant wights being purposely selected, spite of all struggles,
were swung from East to West, in vast arcs of circles,
till almost breathless. Hornpipes, fandangoes, Donnybrookjigs,
reels, and quadrilles, were danced under the very nose of
the most mighty captain, and upon the very quarter-deck and
poop. Sparring and wrestling, too, were all the vogue; Kentucky
bites were given, and the Indian hug exchanged. The
din frightened the sea-fowl, that flew by with accelerated
wing.

It is worth mentioning that several casualties occurred, of
which, however, I will relate but one. While the “skylarking”
was at its height, one of the fore-top-men—an ugly-tempered
devil of a Portuguese, looking on—swore that he would
be the death of any man who laid violent hands upon his inviolable
person. This threat being overheard, a band of desperadoes,
coming up from behind, tripped him up in an instant,
and in the twinkling of an eye the Portuguese was straddling
an oar, borne aloft by an uproarious multitude, who rushed
him along the deck at a rail-road gallop. The living mass of
arms all round and beneath him was so dense, that every
time he inclined to one side he was instantly pushed upright,
but only to fall over again, to receive another push from the
contrary direction. Presently, disengaging his hands from
those who held them, the enraged seaman drew from his bosom
an iron belaying-pin, and recklessly laid about him to
right and left. Most of his persecutors fled; but some eight
or ten still stood their ground, and, while bearing him aloft,

[figure description] Page 126.[end figure description]

endeavored to wrest the weapon from his hands. In this attempt,
one man was struck on the head, and dropped insensible.
He was taken up for dead, and carried below to Cuticle,
the surgeon, while the Portuguese was put under guard.
But the wound did not prove very serious; and in a few days
the man was walking about the deck, with his head well
bandaged.

This occurrence put an end to the “skylarking,” further
head-breaking being strictly prohibited. In due time the
Portuguese paid the penalty of his rashness at the gangway;
while once again the officers shipped their quarter-deck faces.

p277-132 CHAPTER XXVI. THE PITCH OF THE CAPE.

[figure description] Page 127.[end figure description]

Ere the calm had yet left us, a sail had been discerned
from the fore-top-mast-head, at a great distance, probably
three leagues or more. At first it was a mere speck, altogether
out of sight from the deck. By the force of attraction,
or something else equally inscrutable, two ships in a calm,
and equally affected by the currents, will always approximate,
more or less. Though there was not a breath of wind, it was
not a great while before the strange sail was descried from
our bulwarks; gradually, it drew still nearer.

What was she, and whence? There is no object which so
excites interest and conjecture, and, at the same time, baffles
both, as a sail, seen as a mere speck on these remote seas off
Cape Horn.

A breeze! a breeze! for lo! the stranger is now perceptibly
nearing the frigate; the officer's spy-glass pronounces her
a full-rigged ship, with all sail set, and coming right down
to us, though in our own vicinity the calm still reigns.

She is bringing the wind with her. Hurrah! Ay, there
it is! Behold how mincingly it creeps over the sea, just
ruffling and crisping it.

Our top-men were at once sent aloft to loose the sails, and
presently they faintly began to distend. As yet we hardly
had steerage-way. Toward sunset the stranger bore down
before the wind, a complete pyramid of canvass. Never before,
I venture to say, was Cape Horn so audaciously insulted.
Stun'-sails alow and aloft; royals, moon-sails, and every thing
else. She glided under our stern, within hailing distance,
and the signal-quarter-master ran up our ensign to the gaff.

[figure description] Page 128.[end figure description]

“Ship ahoy!” cried the Lieutenant of the Watch, through
his trumpet.

“Halloa!” bawled an old fellow in a green jacket, clapping
one hand to his mouth, while he held on with the other to
the mizzen-shrouds.

“What ship's that?”

“The Sultan, Indiaman, from New York, and bound to Callao
and Canton, sixty days out, all well. What frigate's that?”

“The United States ship Neversink, homeward bound.”

“Hurrah! hurrah! hurrah!” yelled our enthusiastic countryman,
transported with patriotism.

By this time the Sultan had swept past, but the Lieutenant
of the Watch could not withhold a parting admonition.

“D'ye hear? You'd better take in some of your flyingkites
there. Look out for Cape Horn!”

But the friendly advice was lost in the now increasing
wind. With a suddenness by no means unusual in these latitudes,
the light breeze soon became a succession of sharp
squalls, and our sail-proud braggadacio of an Indiaman was
observed to let every thing go by the run, his t'-gallant stun'-sails
and flying-jib taking quick leave of the spars; the flying-jib
was swept into the air, rolled together for a few minutes,
and tossed about in the squalls like a foot-ball. But the wind
played no such pranks with the more prudently managed canvass
of the Neversink, though before many hours it was stirring
times with us.

About midnight, when the starboard watch, to which I belonged,
was below, the boatswain's whistle was heard, followed
by the shrill cry for “All hands take in sail! jump, men,
and save ship!”

Springing from our hammocks, we found the frigate leaning
over to it so steeply, that it was with difficulty we could
climb the ladders leading to the upper deck.

Here the scene was awful. The vessel seemed to be sailing
on her side. The mam-deck guns had several days previous
been run in and housed, and the port-holes closed, but the

[figure description] Page 129.[end figure description]

lee carronades on the quarter-deck and forecastle were plunging
through the sea, which undulated over them in milk-white
billows of foam. With every lurch to leeward the yard-armends
seemed to dip in the sea, while forward the spray dashed
over the bows in cataracts, and drenched the men who were
on the fore-yard. By this time the deck was alive with the
whole strength of the ship's company, five hundred men, officers
and all, mostly clinging to the weather bulwarks. The
occasional phosphorescence of the yeasting sea cast a glare
upon their uplifted faces, as a night fire in a populous city
lights up the panic-stricken crowd.

In a sudden gale, or when a large quantity of sail is suddenly
to be furled, it is the custom for the First Lieutenant
to take the trumpet from whoever happens then to be officer
of the deck. But Mad Jack had the trumpet that watch;
nor did the First Lieutenant now seek to wrest it from his
hands. Every eye was upon him, as if we had chosen him
from among us all, to decide this battle with the elements, by
single combat with the spirit of the Cape; for Mad Jack
was the saving genius of the ship, and so proved himself that
night. I owe this right hand, that is this moment flying over
my sheet, and all my present being to Mad Jack. The ship's
bows were now butting, battering, ramming, and thundering
over and upon the head seas, and with a horrible wallowing
sound our whole hull was rolling in the trough of the foam.
The gale came athwart the deck, and every sail seemed bursting
with its wild breath.

All the quarter-masters, and several of the forecastle-men,
were swarming round the double-wheel on the quarter-deck.
Some jumping up and down, with their hands upon the spokes;
for the whole helm and galvanized keel were fiercely feverish,
with the life imparted to them by the tempest.

“Hard up the helm!” shouted Captain Claret, bursting
from his cabin like a ghost in his night-dress.

“Damn you!” raged Mad Jack to the quarter-masters;
“hard down—hard down, I say, and be damned to you!”

[figure description] Page 130.[end figure description]

Contrary orders! but Mad Jack's were obeyed. His object
was to throw the ship into the wind, so as the better
to admit of close-reefing the top-sails. But though the halyards
were let go, it was impossible to clew down the yards,
owing to the enormous horizontal strain on the canvass. It
now blew a hurricane. The spray flew over the ship in floods.
The gigantic masts seemed about to snap under the worldwide
strain of the three entire top-sails.

“Clew down! clew down!” shouted Mad Jack, husky with
excitement, and in a frenzy, beating his trumpet against one
of the shrouds. But, owing to the slant of the ship, the thing
could not be done. It was obvious that before many minutes
something must go—either sails, rigging, or sticks; perhaps
the hull itself, and all hands.

Presently a voice from the top exclaimed that there was a
rent in the main-top-sail. And instantly we heard a report
like two or three muskets discharged together; the vast sail
was rent up and down like the Vail of the Temple. This
saved the main-mast; for the yard was now clewed down
with comparative ease, and the top-men laid out to stow the
shattered canvass. Soon, the two remaining top-sails were
also clewed down and close reefed.

Above all the roar of the tempest and the shouts of the
crew, was heard the dismal tolling of the ship's bell—almost
as large as that of a village church—which the violent rolling
of the ship was occasioning. Imagination can not conceive
the horror of such a sound in a night-tempest at sea.

“Stop that ghost!” roared Mad Jack; “away, one of you,
and wrench off the clapper!”

But no sooner was this ghost gagged, than a still more appalling
sound was heard, the rolling to and fro of the heavy
shot, which, on the gun-deck, had broken loose from the
gun-racks, and converted that part of the ship into an immense
bowling-alley. Some hands were sent down to secure
them; but it was as much as their lives were worth. Several
were maimed; and the midshipmen who were ordered

[figure description] Page 131.[end figure description]

to see the duty performed reported it impossible, until the
storm abated.

The most terrific job of all was to furl the main-sail, which,
at the commencement of the squalls, had been clewed up,
coaxed and quieted as much as possible with the bunt-lines
and slab-lines. Mad Jack waited some time for a lull, ere
he gave an order so perilous to be executed. For to furl this
enormous sail, in such a gale, required at least fifty men on
the yard; whose weight, superadded to that of the ponderous
stick itself, still further jeopardized their lives. But there
was no prospect of a cessation of the gale, and the order was
at last given.

At this time a hurricane of slanting sleet and hail was descending
upon us; the rigging was coated with a thin glare
of ice, formed within the hour.

“Aloft, main-yard-men! and all you main-top-men! and
furl the main-sail!” cried Mad Jack.

I dashed down my hat, slipped out of my quilted jacket
in an instant, kicked the shoes from my feet, and, with a
crowd of others, sprang for the rigging. Above the bulwarks
(which in a frigate are so high as to afford much protection
to those on deck) the gale was horrible. The sheer force of
the wind flattened us to the rigging as we ascended, and
every hand seemed congealing to the icy shrouds by which
we held.

“Up—up, my brave hearties!” shouted Mad Jack; and
up we got, some way or other, all of us, and groped our way
out on the yard-arms.

“Hold on, every mother's son!” cried an old quarter-gunner
at my side. He was bawling at the top of his compass;
but in the gale, he seemed to be whispering; and I only heard
him from his being right to windward of me.

But his hint was unnecessary; I dug my nails into the
jack-stays, and swore that nothing but death should part me
and them until I was able to turn round and look to windward.
As yet, this was impossible; I could scarcely hear

[figure description] Page 132.[end figure description]

the man to leeward at my elbow; the wind seemed to snatch
the words from his mouth and fly away with them to the
South Pole.

All this while the sail itself was flying about, sometimes
catching over our head, and threatening to tear us from the
yard in spite of all our hugging. For about three quarters
of an hour we thus hung suspended right over the rampant
billows, which curled their very crests under the feet of some
four or five of us clinging to the lee-yard-arm, as if to float us
from our place.

Presently, the word passed along the yard from windward,
that we were ordered to come down and leave the sail to
blow, since it could not be furled. A midshipman, it seemed,
had been sent up by the officer of the deck to give the order,
as no trumpet could be heard where we were.

Those on the weather yard-arm managed to crawl upon
the spar and scramble down the rigging; but with us, upon
the extreme leeward side, this feat was out of the question;
it was, literally, like climbing a precipice to get to windward
in order to reach the shrouds; besides, the entire yard was
now encased in ice, and our hands and feet were so numb
that we dared not trust our lives to them. Nevertheless, by
assisting each other, we contrived to throw ourselves prostrate
along the yard, and embrace it with our arms and legs. In
this position, the stun'-sail-booms greatly assisted in securing
our hold. Strange as it may appear, I do not suppose that,
at this moment, the slightest sensation of fear was felt by one
man on that yard. We clung to it with might and main;
but this was instinct. The truth is, that, in circumstances
like these, the sense of fear is annihilated in the unutterable
sights that fill all the eye, and the sounds that fill all the ear.
You become identified with the tempest; your insignificance
is lost in the riot of the stormy universe around.

Below us, our noble frigate seemed thrice its real length—
a vast black wedge, opposing its widest end to the combined
fury of the sea and wind.

[figure description] Page 133.[end figure description]

At length the first fury of the gale began to abate, and we
at once fell to pounding our hands, as a preliminary operation
to going to work; for a gang of men had now ascended to
help secure what was left of the sail; we somehow packed it
away, at last, and came down.

About noon the next day, the gale so moderated that we
shook two reefs out of the top-sails, set new courses, and stood
due east, with the wind astern.

Thus, all the fine weather we encountered after first weighing
anchor on the pleasant Spanish coast, was but the prelude
to this one terrific night; more especially, that treacherous
calm immediately preceding it. But how could we reach our
long-promised homes without encountering Cape Horn? by
what possibility avoid it? And though some ships have
weathered it without these perils, yet by far the greater part
must encounter them. Lucky it is that it comes about midway
in the homeward-bound passage, so that the sailors have
time to prepare for it, and time to recover from it after it is
astern.

But, sailor or landsman, there is some sort of a Cape Horn
for all. Boys! beware of it; prepare for it in time. Graybeards!
thank God it is passed. And ye lucky livers, to
whom, by some rare fatality, your Cape Horns are placid as
Lake Lemans, flatter not yourselves that good luck is judgment
and discretion; for all the yolk in your eggs, you might
have foundered and gone down, had the Spirit of the Cape
said the word.

p277-139 CHAPTER XXVII. SOME THOUGHTS GROWING OUT OF MAD JACK'S COUNTERMANDING HIS SUPERIOR'S ORDER.

[figure description] Page 134.[end figure description]

In time of peril, like the needle to the load-stone, obedience,
irrespective of rank, generally flies to him who is best
fitted to command. The truth of this seemed evinced in the
case of Mad Jack, during the gale, and especially at that
perilous moment when he countermanded the Captain's order
at the helm. But every seaman knew, at the time, that the
Captain's order was an unwise one in the extreme; perhaps
worse than unwise.

These two orders, given by the Captain and his Lieutenant,
exactly contrasted their characters. By putting the
helm hard up, the Captain was for scudding; that is, for
flying away from the gale. Whereas, Mad Jack was for
running the ship into its teeth. It is needless to say that, in
almost all cases of similar hard squalls and gales, the latter
step, though attended with more appalling appearances, is, in
reality, the safer of the two, and the most generally adopted.

Scudding makes you a slave to the blast, which drives you
headlong before it; but running up into the wind's eye enables
you, in a degree, to hold it at bay. Scudding exposes to
the gale your stern, the weakest part of your hull; the contrary
course presents to it your bows, your strongest part.
As with ships, so with men; he who turns his back to his
foe gives him an advantage. Whereas, our ribbed chests,
like the ribbed bows of a frigate, are as bulkheads to dam off
an onset.

That night, off the pitch of the Cape, Captain Claret was
hurried forth from his disguises, and, at a manhood-testing

[figure description] Page 135.[end figure description]

conjuncture, appeared in his true colors. A thing which every
man in the ship had long suspected that night was proved
true. Hitherto, in going about the ship, and casting his
glances among the men, the peculiarly lustreless repose of the
Captain's eye—his slow, even, unnecessarily methodical step,
and the forced firmness of his whole demeanor—though, to a
casual observer, seemingly expressive of the consciousness of
command and a desire to strike subjection among the crew—
all this, to some minds, had only been deemed indications
of the fact that Captain Claret, while carefully shunning positive
excesses, continually kept himself in an uncertain equilibrio
between soberness and its reverse; which equilibrio
might be destroyed by the first sharp vicissitude of events.

And though this is only a surmise, nevertheless, as having
some knowledge of brandy and mankind, White-Jacket will
venture to state that, had Captain Claret been an out-and-out
temperance man, he would never have given that most imprudent
order to hard up the helm. He would either have
held his peace, and stayed in his cabin, like his gracious majesty
the Commodore, or else have anticipated Mad Jack's order,
and thundered forth “Hard down the helm!”

To show how little real sway at times have the severest restrictive
laws, and how spontaneous is the instinct of discretion
in some minds, it must here be added, that though Mad Jack,
under a hot impulse, had countermanded an order of his superior
officer before his very face, yet that severe Article of
War, to which he thus rendered himself obnoxious, was never
enforced against him. Nor, so far as any of the crew ever
knew, did the Captain even venture to reprimand him for his
temerity.

It has been said that Mad Jack himself was a lover of
strong drink. So he was. But here we only see the virtue
of being placed in a station constantly demanding a cool head
and steady nerves, and the misfortune of filling a post that
does not at all times demand these qualities. So exact and
methodical in most things was the discipline of the frigate,

[figure description] Page 136.[end figure description]

that, to a certain extent, Captain Claret was exempted from
personal interposition in many of its current events, and thereby,
perhaps, was he lulled into security, under the enticing
lee of his decanter.

But as for Mad Jack, he must stand his regular watches,
and pace the quarter-deck at night, and keep a sharp eye to
windward. Hence, at sea, Mad Jack tried to make a point
of keeping sober, though in very fine weather he was sometimes
betrayed into a glass too many. But with Cape Horn
before him, he took the temperance pledge outright, till that
perilous promontory should be far astern.

The leading incident of the gale irresistibly invites the
question, Are there incompetent officers in the American
navy?—that is, incompetent to the due performance of whatever
duties may devolve upon them. But in that gallant
marine, which, during the Late War, gained so much of
what is called glory, can there possibly be to-day incompetent
officers?

As in the camp ashore, so on the quarter-deck at sea—the
trumpets of one victory drown the muffled drums of a thousand
defeats. And, in degree, this holds true of those events
of war which are neuter in their character, neither making
renown nor disgrace. Besides, as a long array of ciphers, led
by but one solitary numeral, swell, by mere force of aggregation,
into an immense arithmetical sum, even so, in some brilliant
actions, do a crowd of officers, each inefficient in himself,
aggregate renown when banded together, and led by a numeral
Nelson or a Wellington. And the renown of such heroes,
by outliving themselves, descends as a heritage to their subordinate
survivors. One large brain and one large heart have
virtue sufficient to magnetize a whole fleet or an army. And
if all the men who, since the beginning of the world, have
mainly contributed to the warlike successes or reverses of nations,
were now mustered together, we should be amazed to
behold but a handful of heroes. For there is no heroism in
merely running in and out a gun at a port-hole, enveloped in

[figure description] Page 137.[end figure description]

smoke or vapor, or in firing off muskets in platoons at the word
of command. This kind of merely manual valor is often born
of trepidation at the heart. There may be men, individually
craven, who, united, may display even temerity. Yet it would
be false to deny that, in some instances, the lowest privates
have acquitted themselves with even more gallantry than their
commodores. True heroism is not in the hand, but in the heart
and the head.

But are there incompetent officers in the gallant American
navy? For an American, the question is of no grateful cast.
White-Jacket must again evade it, by referring to an historical
fact in the history of a kindred marine, which, from its
long standing and magnitude, furnishes many more examples
of all kinds than our own. And this is the only reason why
it is ever referred to in this narrative. I thank God I am
free from all national invidiousness.

It is indirectly on record in the books of the English Admiralty,
that in the year 1808—after the death of Lord Nelson—
when Lord Collingwood commanded on the Mediterranean
station, and his broken health induced him to solicit a
furlough, that out of a list of upward of one hundred admirals,
not a single officer was found who was deemed qualified to
relieve the applicant with credit to the country. This fact
Collingwood sealed with his life; for, hopeless of being recalled,
he shortly after died, worn out, at his post. Now, if this
was the case in so renowned a marine as England's, what
must be inferred with respect to our own? But herein no
special disgrace is involved. For the truth is, that to be an
accomplished and skillful naval generalissimo needs natural
capabilities of an uncommon order. Still more, it may safely
be asserted, that, worthily to command even a frigate, requires
a degree of natural heroism, talent, judgment, and integrity,
that is denied to mediocrity. Yet these qualifications are
not only required, but demanded; and no one has a right to
be a naval captain unless he possesses them.

Regarding Lieutenants, there are not a few Selvagees and

[figure description] Page 138.[end figure description]

Paper Jacks in the American navy. Many Commodores
know that they have seldom taken a line-of-battle ship to sea,
without feeling more or less nervousness when some of the
Lieutenants have the deck at night.

According to the last Navy Register (1849), there are now
68 Captains in the American navy, collectively drawing
about $300,000 annually from the public treasury; also,
297 Commanders, drawing about $200,000; and 377 Lieutenants,
drawing about half a million; and 451 Midshipmen
(including Passed-midshipmen), also drawing nearly half a
million. Considering the known facts, that some of these officers
are seldom or never sent to sea, owing to the Navy Department
being well aware of their inefficiency; that others
are detailed for pen-and-ink work at observatories, and solvers
of logarithms in the Coast Survey; while the really meritorious
officers, who are accomplished practical seamen, are known
to be sent from ship to ship, with but a small interval of a
furlough; considering all this, it is not too much to say, that
no small portion of the million and a half of money above
mentioned is annually paid to national pensioners in disguise,
who live on the navy without serving it.

Nothing like this can be even insinuated against the “forward
officers”—Boatswains, Gunners, &c.; nor against the
petty officers—Captains of the Tops, &c.; nor against the
able seamen in the navy. For if any of these are found wanting,
they are forthwith disrated or discharged.

True, all experience teaches that, whenever there is a great
national establishment, employing large numbers of officials,
the public must be reconciled to support many incompetent
men; for such is the favoritism and nepotism always prevailing
in the purlieus of these establishments, that some incompetent
persons are always admitted, to the exclusion of many
of the worthy.

Nevertheless, in a country like ours, boasting of the political
equality of all social conditions, it is a great reproach that
such a thing as a common seaman rising to the rank of a

[figure description] Page 139.[end figure description]

commissioned officer in our navy, is nowadays almost unheard-of.
Yet, in former times, when officers have so risen to rank, they
have generally proved of signal usefulness in the service, and
sometimes have reflected solid honor upon the country. Instances
in point might be mentioned.

Is it not well to have our institutions of a piece? Any
American landsman may hope to become President of the
Union—commodore of our squadron of states. And every
American sailor should be placed in such a position, that he
might freely aspire to command a squadron of frigates.

p277-145 CHAPTER XXVIII. EDGING AWAY.

[figure description] Page 140.[end figure description]

Right before the wind! Ay, blow, blow, ye breezes; so
long as ye stay fair, and we are homeward bound, what care
the jolly crew?

It is worth mentioning here that, in nineteen cases out of
twenty, a passage from the Pacific round the Cape is almost
sure to be much shorter, and attended with less hardship, than
a passage undertaken from the Atlantic. The reason is, that
the gales are mostly from the westward, also the currents.

But, after all, going before the wind in a frigate, in such a
tempest, has its annoyances and drawbacks, as well as many
other blessings. The disproportionate weight of metal upon
the spar and gun decks induces a violent rolling, unknown to
merchant ships. We rolled and rolled on our way, like the
world in its orbit, shipping green seas on both sides, until the
old frigate dipped and went into it like a diving-bell.

The hatchways of some armed vessels are but poorly secured
in bad weather. This was peculiarly the case with those
of the Neversink. They were merely spread over with an old
tarpaulin, cracked and rent in every direction.

In fair weather, the ship's company messed on the gun-deck;
but as this was now flooded almost continually, we
were obliged to take our meals upon the berth-deck, the next
one below. One day, the messes of the starboard-watch were
seated here at dinner; forming little groups, twelve or fifteen
men in each, reclining about the beef-kids and their pots and
pans; when all of a sudden the ship was seized with such a
paroxysm of rolling that, in a single instant, every thing on
the berth-deck—pots, kids, sailors, pieces of beef, bread-bags,

[figure description] Page 141.[end figure description]

clothes-bags, and barges—were tossed indiscriminately from
side to side. It was impossible to stay one's self; there was
nothing but the bare deck to cling to, which was slippery with
the contents of the kids, and heaving under us as if there were
a volcano in the frigate's hold. While we were yet sliding
in uproarious crowds—all seated—the windows of the deck
opened, and floods of brine descended, simultaneously with a
violent lee-roll. The shower was hailed by the reckless tars
with a hurricane of yells; although, for an instant, I really
imagined we were about being swamped in the sea, such volumes
of water came cascading down.

A day or two after, we had made sufficient Easting to stand
to the northward, which we did, with the wind astern; thus
fairly turning the corner without abating our rate of progress.
Though we had seen no land since leaving Callao, Cape Horn
was said to be somewhere to the West of us; and though
there was no positive evidence of the fact, the weather encountered
might be accounted pretty good presumptive proof.

The land near Cape Horn, however, is well worth seeing,
especially Staten Land. Upon one occasion, the ship in which
I then happened to be sailing drew near this place from the
northward, with a fair, free wind, blowing steadily, through
a bright translucent day, whose air was almost musical with
the clear, glittering cold. On our starboard beam, like a pile
of glaciers in Switzerland, lay this Staten Land, gleaming in
snow-white barrenness and solitude. Unnumbered white albatross
were skimming the sea near by, and clouds of smaller
white wings fell through the air like snow-flakes. High, towering
in their own turbaned snows, the far-inland pinnacles
loomed up, like the border of some other world. Flashing
walls and crystal battlements, like the diamond watch-towers
along heaven's furthest frontier.

After leaving the latitude of the Cape, we had several
storms of snow; one night a considerable quantity laid upon
the decks, and some of the sailors enjoyed the juvenile diversion
of snow-balling. Woe unto the “middy” who that night

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went forward of the booms. Such a target for snow-balls!
The throwers could never be known. By some curious sleight
in hurling the missiles, they seemed to be thrown on board by
some hoydenish sea-nymphs outside the frigate.

At daybreak Midshipman Pert went below to the surgeon
with an alarming wound, gallantly received in discharging his
perilous duty on the forecastle. The officer of the deck had
sent him on an errand, to tell the boatswain that he was
wanted in the captain's cabin. While in the very act of performing
the exploit of delivering the message, Mr. Pert was
struck on the nose with a snow-ball of wondrous compactness.
Upon being informed of the disaster, the rogues expressed the
liveliest sympathy. Pert was no favorite.

After one of these storms, it was a curious sight to see the
men relieving the uppermost deck of its load of snow. It
became the duty of the captain of each gun to keep his own
station clean; accordingly, with an old broom, or “squilgee,”
he proceeded to business, often quarreling with his next-door
neighbors about their scraping their snow on his premises.
It was like Broadway in winter, the morning after a storm,
when rival shop-boys are at work cleaning the sidewalk.

Now and then, by way of variety, we had a fall of hail-stones,
so big that sometimes we found ourselves dodging
them.

The Commodore had a Polynesian servant on board, whose
services he had engaged at the Society Islands. Unlike his
countrymen, Wooloo was of a sedate, earnest, and philosophic
temperament. Having never been outside of the tropics before,
he found many phenomena off Cape Horn, which absorbed
his attention, and set him, like other philosophers, to
feign theories corresponding to the marvels he beheld. At
the first snow, when he saw the deck covered all over with
a white powder, as it were, he expanded his eyes into stewpans;
but upon examining the strange substance, he decided
that this must be a species of superfine flour, such as was
compounded into his master's “duffs,” and other dainties.

[figure description] Page 143.[end figure description]

In vain did an experienced natural philosopher belonging to
the fore-top maintain before his face, that in this hypothesis
Wooloo was mistaken; Wooloo's opinion remained unchanged
for some time.

As for the hailstones, they transported him; he went about
with a bucket, making collections, and receiving contributions,
for the purpose of carrying them home to his sweet-hearts for
glass beads; but having put his bucket away, and returning
to it again, and finding nothing but a little water, he accused
the by-standers of stealing his precious stones.

This suggests another story concerning him. The first
time he was given a piece of “duff” to eat, he was observed
to pick out very carefully every raisin, and throw it away,
with a gesture indicative of the highest disgust. It turned
out that he had taken the raisins for bugs.

In our man-of-war, this semi-savage, wandering about the
gun-deck in his barbaric robe, seemed a being from some
other sphere. His tastes were our abominations: ours his.
Our creed he rejected: his we. We thought him a loon:
he fancied us fools. Had the case been reversed; had we
been Polynesians and he an American, our mutual opinion of
each other would still have remained the same. A fact
proving that neither was wrong, but both right.

p277-149 CHAPTER XXIX. THE NIGHT-WATCHES.

[figure description] Page 144.[end figure description]

Though leaving the Cape behind us, the severe cold still
continued, and one of its worst consequences was the almost
incurable drowsiness induced thereby during the long night-watches.
All along the decks, huddled between the guns,
stretched out on the carronade slides, and in every accessible
nook and corner, you would see the sailors wrapped in their
monkey jackets, in a state of half-conscious torpidity, lying
still and freezing alive, without the power to rise and shake
themselves.

“Up—up, you lazy dogs!” our good-natured Third Lieutenant,
a Virginian, would cry, rapping them with his speaking
trumpet. “Get up, and stir about.”

But in vain. They would rise for an instant, and as soon
as his back was turned, down they would drop, as if shot
through the heart.

Often I have lain thus, when the fact, that if I laid much
longer I would actually freeze to death, would come over me
with such overpowering force as to break the icy spell, and
starting to my feet, I would endeavor to go through the combined
manual and pedal exercise to restore the circulation.
The first fling of my benumbed arm generally struck me in
the face, instead of smiting my chest, its true destination.
But in these cases one's muscles have their own way.

In exercising my other extremities, I was obliged to hold on
to something, and leap with both feet; for my limbs seemed
as destitute of joints as a pair of canvass pants spread to dry,
and frozen stiff.

When an order was given to haul the braces—which

[figure description] Page 145.[end figure description]

required the strength of the entire watch, some two hundred
men—a spectator would have supposed that all hands had received
a stroke of the palsy. Roused from their state of enchantment,
they came halting and limping across the decks,
falling against each other, and, for a few moments, almost unable
to handle the ropes. The slightest exertion seemed intolerable;
and frequently a body of eighty or a hundred men,
summoned to brace the main-yard, would hang over the rope
for several minutes, waiting for some active fellow to pick it
up and put it into their hands. Even then, it was some time
before they were able to do any thing. They made all the
motions usual in hauling a rope, but it was a long time before
the yard budged an inch. It was to no purpose that the officers
swore at them, or sent the midshipmen among them to
find out who those “horse-marines” and “sogers” were. The
sailors were so enveloped in monkey jackets, that in the dark
night there was no telling one from the other.

“Here, you, sir!” cries little Mr. Pert, eagerly catching
hold of the skirts of an old sea-dog, and trying to turn him
round, so as to peer under his tarpaulin. “Who are you,
sir? What's your name?”

“Find out, Milk-and-Water,” was the impertinent rejoinder.

“Blast you! you old rascal; I'll have you licked for that!
Tell me his name, some of you!” turning round to the bystanders.

“Gammon!” cries a voice at a distance.

“Hang me, but I know you, sir! and here's at you!” and,
so saying, Mr. Pert drops the impenetrable unknown, and
makes into the crowd after the bodiless voice. But the attempt
to find an owner for that voice is quite as idle as the
effort to discover the contents of the monkey jacket.

And here sorrowful mention must be made of something
which, during this state of affairs, most sorely afflicted me.
Most monkey jackets are of a dark hue; mine, as I have fifty
times repeated, and say again, was white. And thus, in those
long, dark nights, when it was my quarter-watch on deck, and

[figure description] Page 146.[end figure description]

not in the top, and others went skulking and “sogering” about
the decks, secure from detection—their identity undiscoverable—
my own hapless jacket forever proclaimed the name of its
wearer. It gave me many a hard job, which otherwise I
should have escaped. When an officer wanted a man for
any particular duty—running aloft, say, to communicate some
slight order to the captains of the tops—how easy, in that
mob of incognitoes, to individualize “that white jacket,” and
dispatch him on the errand. Then, it would never do for me
to hang back when the ropes were being pulled.

Indeed, upon all these occasions, such alacrity and cheerfulness
was I obliged to display, that I was frequently held up as
an illustrious example of activity, which the rest were called
upon to emulate. “Pull—pull! you lazy lubbers! Look at
White-Jacket, there; pull like him!”

Oh! how I execrated my luckless garment; how often I
scoured the deck with it to give it a tawny hue; how often
I supplicated the inexorable Brush, captain of the paint-room,
for just one brushful of his invaluable pigment. Frequently,
I meditated giving it a toss overboard; but I had not the
resolution. Jacketless at sea! Jacketless so near Cape
Horn! The thought was unendurable. And, at least, my
garment was a jacket in name, if not in utility.

At length I essayed a “swap.” “Here, Bob,” said I, assuming
all possible suavity, and accosting a mess-mate with
a sort of diplomatic assumption of superiority, “suppose I was
ready to part with this `grego' of mine, and take yours in exchange—
what would you give me to boot?”

“Give you to boot?” he exclaimed, with horror; “I wouldn't
take your infernal jacket for a gift!”

How I hailed every snow-squall; for then—blessings on
them!—many of the men became white jackets along with
myself; and, powdered with the flakes, we all looked like
millers.

We had six lieutenants, all of whom, with the exception
of the First Lieutenant, by turns headed the watches. Three

[figure description] Page 147.[end figure description]

of these officers, including Mad Jack, were strict disciplinarians,
and never permitted us to lay down on deck during the
night. And, to tell the truth, though it caused much growling,
it was far better for our health to be thus kept on our
feet. So promenading was all the vogue. For some of us,
however, it was like pacing in a dungeon; for, as we had to
keep at our stations—some at the halyards, some at the braces,
and elsewhere—and were not allowed to stroll about indefinitely,
and fairly take the measure of the ship's entire keel, we
were fain to confine ourselves to the space of a very few feet.
But the worst of this was soon over. The suddenness of the
change in the temperature consequent on leaving Cape Horn,
and steering to the northward with a ten-knot breeze, is a
noteworthy thing. To-day, you are assailed by a blast that
seems to have edged itself on icebergs; but in a little more
than a week, your jacket may be superfluous.

One word more about Cape Horn, and we have done with it.

Years hence, when a ship-canal shall have penetrated the
Isthmus of Darien, and the traveler be taking his seat in the
cars at Cape Cod for Astoria, it will be held a thing almost
incredible that, for so long a period, vessels bound to the Norwest
Coast from New York should, by going round Cape
Horn, have lengthened their voyages some thousands of miles
“In those unenlightened days” (I quote, in advance, the language
of some future philosopher), “entire years were frequently
consumed in making the voyage to and from the Spice
Islands, the present fashionable watering-place of the beaumonde
of Oregon.” Such must be our national progress.

Why, sir, that boy of yours will, one of these days, be sending
your grandson to the salubrious city of Jeddo to spend his
summer vacations.

p277-153 CHAPTER XXX. A PEEP THROUGH A PORT-HOLE AT THE SUBTERRANEAN PARTS OF A MAN-OF-WAR.

[figure description] Page 148.[end figure description]

While now running rapidly away from the bitter coast of
Patagonia, battling with the night-watches—still cold—as
best we may; come under the lee of my white-jacket, reader,
while I tell of the less painful sights to be seen in a frigate.

A hint has already been conveyed concerning the subterranean
depths of the Neversink's hold. But there is no time
here to speak of the spirit-room, a cellar down in the afterhold,
where the sailor “grog” is kept; nor of the cable-tiers,
where the great hawsers and chains are piled, as you see them
at a large ship-chandler's on shore; nor of the grocer's vaults,
where tierces of sugar, molasses, vinegar, rice, and flour are
snugly stowed; nor of the sail-room, full as a sail-maker's
loft ashore—piled up with great top-sails and top-gallant-sails,
all ready-folded in their places, like so many white vests in a
gentleman's wardrobe; nor of the copper and copper-fastened
magazine, closely packed with kegs of powder, great-gun and
small-arm cartridges; nor of the immense shot-lockers, or
subterranean arsenals, full as a bushel of apples with twenty-four-pound
balls; nor of the bread-room, a large apartment,
tinned all round within to keep out the mice, where the hard
biscuit destined for the consumption of five hundred men on a
long voyage is stowed away by the cubic yard; nor of the
vast iron tanks for fresh water in the hold, like the reservoir
lakes at Fairmount, in Philadelphia; nor of the paint-room,
where the kegs of white-lead, and casks of linseed oil, and all
sorts of pots and brushes, are kept; nor of the armoror's smithy,
where the ship's forges and anvils may be heard ringing at

[figure description] Page 149.[end figure description]

times; I say I have no time to speak of these things, and
many more places of note.

But there is one very extensive warehouse among the rest
that needs special mention—the ship's Yeoman's store-room.
In the Neversink it was down in the ship's basement, beneath
the berth-deck, and you went to it by way of the Forepassage,
a very dim, devious corridor, indeed. Entering—
say at noonday—you find yourself in a gloomy apartment, lit
by a solitary lamp. On one side are shelves, filled with balls
of marline, ratlin-stuff, seizing-stuff, spun-yarn, and numerous
twines of assorted sizes. In another direction you see
large cases containing heaps of articles, reminding one of a
shoe-maker's furnishing-store—wooden serving-mallets, fids,
toggles, and heavers; iron prickers and marling-spikes; in a
third quarter you see a sort of hardware shop—shelves piled
with all manner of hooks, bolts, nails, screws, and thimbles;
and, in still another direction, you see a block-maker's store,
heaped up with lignum-vitæ sheeves and wheels.

Through low arches in the bulk-head beyond, you peep in
upon distant vaults and catacombs, obscurely lighted in the
far end, and showing immense coils of new ropes, and other
bulky articles, stowed in tiers, all savoring of tar.

But by far the most curious department of these mysterious
store-rooms is the armory, where the pikes, cutlasses, pistols,
and belts, forming the arms of the boarders in time of action,
are hung against the walls, and suspended in thick rows from
the beams overhead. Here, too, are to be seen scores of Colt's
patent revolvers, which, though furnished with but one tube,
multiply the fatal bullets, as the naval cat-o'-nine-tails, with
a cannibal cruelty, in one blow nine times multiplies a culprit's
lashes; so that, when a sailor is ordered one dozen lashes,
the sentence should read one hundred and eight. All these
arms are kept in the brightest order, wearing a fine polish, and
may truly be said to reflect credit on the Yeoman and his mates.

Among the lower grade of officers in a man-of-war, that of
Yeoman is not the least important. His responsibilities are

[figure description] Page 150.[end figure description]

denoted by his pay. While the petty officers, quarter-gunners,
captains of the tops, and others, receive but fifteen and eighteen
dollars a month—but little more than a mere able seaman—
the Yeoman in an American line-of-battle ship receives forty
dollars, and in a frigate thirty-five dollars per month.

He is accountable for all the articles under his charge, and
on no account must deliver a yard of twine or a tenpenny nail
to the boatswain or carpenter, unless shown a written requisition
and order from the Senior Lieutenant. The Yeoman
is to be found burrowing in his under-ground store-rooms all
the day long, in readiness to serve licensed customers. But
in the counter, behind which he usually stands, there is no
place for a till to drop the shillings in, which takes away not
a little from the most agreeable part of a storekeeper's duties.
Nor, among the musty, old account-books in his desk, where
he registers all expenditures of his stuffs, is there any cash or
check book.

The Yeoman of the Neversink was a somewhat odd specimen
of a Troglodite. He was a little old man, round-shouldered,
bald-headed, with great goggle-eyes, looking through
portentous round spectacles, which he called his barnacles.
He was imbued with a wonderful zeal for the naval service,
and seemed to think that, in keeping his pistols and cutlasses
free from rust, he preserved the national honor untarnished.

After general quarters, it was amusing to watch his anxious
air as the various petty officers restored to him the arms
used at the martial exercises of the crew. As successive
bundles would be deposited on his counter, he would count
over the pistols and cutlasses, like an old housekeeper telling
over her silver forks and spoons in a pantry before retiring for
the night. And often, with a sort of dark lantern in his
hand, he might be seen poking into his furthest vaults and
cellars, and counting over his great coils of ropes, as if they
were all jolly puncheons of old Port and Madeira.

By reason of his incessant watchfulness and unaccountable
bachelor oddities, it was very difficult for him to retain in his

[figure description] Page 151.[end figure description]

employment the various sailors who, from time to time, were
billeted with him to do the duty of subalterns. In particular,
he was always desirous of having at least one steady, faultless
young man, of a literary taste, to keep an eye to his account-books,
and swab out the armory every morning. It was an
odious business this, to be immured all day in such a bottomless
hole, among tarry old ropes and villainous guns and pistols.
It was with peculiar dread that I one day noticed the
goggle-eyes of Old Revolver, as they called him, fastened upon
me with a fatal glance of good-will and approbation. He
had somehow heard of my being a very learned person, who
could both read and write with extraordinary facility; and,
moreover, that I was a rather reserved youth, who kept his
modest, unassuming merits in the background. But though,
from the keen sense of my situation as a man-of-war's-man,
all this about my keeping myself in the back ground was
true enough, yet I had no idea of hiding my diffident merits
under ground. I became alarmed at the old Yeoman's goggling
glances, lest he should drag me down into tarry perdition
in his hideous store-rooms. But this fate was providentially
averted, owing to mysterious causes which I never could
fathom.

p277-157 CHAPTER XXXI. THE GUNNER UNDER HATCHES.

[figure description] Page 152.[end figure description]

Among such a crowd of marked characters as were to be
met with on board our frigate, many of whom moved in mysterious
circles beneath the lowermost deck, and at long intervals
flitted into sight like apparitions, and disappeared again
for whole weeks together, there were some who inordinately
excited my curiosity, and whose names, callings, and precise
abodes I industriously sought out, in order to learn something
satisfactory concerning them.

While engaged in these inquiries, often fruitless, or but partially
gratified, I could not but regret that there was no public
printed Directory for the Neversink, such as they have in
large towns, containing an alphabetic list of all the crew, and
where they might be found. Also, in losing myself in some
remote, dark corner of the bowels of the frigate, in the vicinity
of the various store-rooms, shops, and warehouses, I much
lamented that no enterprising tar had yet thought of compiling
a Hand-book of the Neversink, so that the tourist might
have a reliable guide.

Indeed, there were several parts of the ship under hatches
shrouded in mystery, and completely inaccessible to the sailor.
Wondrous old doors, barred and bolted in dingy bulk-heads,
must have opened into regions full of interest to a successful
explorer.

They looked like the gloomy entrances to family vaults of
buried dead; and when I chanced to see some unknown functionary
insert his key, and enter these inexplicable apartments
with a battle-lantern, as if on solemn official business, I almost
quaked to dive in with him, and satisfy myself whether these

[figure description] Page 153.[end figure description]

vaults indeed contained the moldering relics of by-gone old
Commodores and Post-captains. But the habitations of the
living commodore and captain—their spacious and curtained
cabins—were themselves almost as sealed volumes, and I
passed them in hopeless wonderment, like a peasant before a
prince's palace. Night and day armed sentries guarded their
sacred portals, cutlass in hand; and had I dared to cross their
path, I would infallibly have been cut down, as if in battle.
Thus, though for a period of more than a year I was an inmate
of this floating box of live-oak, yet there were numberless
things in it that, to the last, remained wrapped in obscurity,
or concerning which I could only lose myself in vague
speculations. I was as a Roman Jew of the Middle Ages,
confined to the Jews' quarter of the town, and forbidden to
stray beyond my limits. Or I was as a modern traveler in
the same famous city, forced to quit it at last without gaining
ingress to the most mysterious haunts—the innermost shrine
of the Pope, and the dungeons and cells of the Inquisition.

But among all the persons and things on board that puzzled
me, and filled me most with strange emotions of doubt,
misgivings, and mystery, was the Gunner—a short, square,
grim man, his hair and beard grizzled and singed, as if with
gunpowder. His skin was of a flecky brown, like the stained
barrel of a fowling-piece, and his hollow eyes burned in his
head like blue-lights. He it was who had access to many of
those mysterious vaults I have spoken of. Often he might be
seen groping his way into them, followed by his subalterns,
the old quarter-gunners, as if intent upon laying a train of
powder to blow up the ship. I remembered Guy Fawkes
and the Parliament-house, and made earnest inquiry whether
this gunner was a Roman Catholic. I felt relieved when informed
that he was not.

A little circumstance which one of his mates once told me
heightened the gloomy interest with which I regarded his
chief. He told me that, at periodical intervals, his master the
Gunner, accompanied by his phalanx, entered into the great

[figure description] Page 154.[end figure description]

Magazine under the Gun-room, of which he had sole custody
and kept the key, nearly as big as the key of the Bastile,
and provided with lanterns, something like Sir Humphrey
Davy's Safety-lamp for coal mines, proceeded to turn, end
for end, all the kegs of powder and packages of cartridges
stored in this innermost explosive vault, lined throughout with
sheets of copper. In the vestibule of the Magazine, against
the paneling, were several pegs for slippers, and, before penetrating
further than that vestibule, every man of the gunner'sgang
silently removed his shoes, for fear that the nails in their
heels might possibly create a spark, by striking against the
coppered floor within. Then, with slippered feet and with
hushed whispers, they stole into the heart of the place.

This turning of the powder was to preserve its inflammability.
And surely it was a business full of direful interest,
to be buried so deep below the sun, handling whole barrels of
powder, any one of which, touched by the smallest spark, was
powerful enough to blow up a whole street of warehouses.

The gunner went by the name of Old Combustibles, though
I thought this an undignified name for so momentous a personage,
who had all our lives in his hand.

While we lay in Callao, we received from shore several
barrels of powder. So soon as the launch came alongside
with them, orders were given to extinguish all lights and all
fires in the ship; and the master-at-arms and his corporals
inspected every deck to see that this order was obeyed; a
very prudent precaution, no doubt, but not observed at all in
the Turkish navy. The Turkish sailors will sit on their
gun-carriages, tranquilly smoking, while kegs of powder are
being rolled under their ignited pipe-bowls. This shows the
great comfort there is in the doctrine of these Fatalists, and
how such a doctrine, in some things at least, relieves men from
nervous anxieties. But we are all Fatalists at bottom. Nor
need we so much marvel at the heroism of that army officer,
who challenged his personal foe to bestride a barrel of powder
with him—the match to be placed between them—and be

[figure description] Page 155.[end figure description]

blown up in good company, for it is pretty certain that the
whole earth itself is a vast hogshead, full of inflammable materials,
and which we are always bestriding; at the same time,
that all good Christians believe that at any minute the last
day may come, and the terrible combustion of the entire
planet ensue.

As if impressed with a befitting sense of the awfulness of
his calling, our gunner always wore a fixed expression of
solemnity, which was heightened by his grizzled hair and
beard. But what imparted such a sinister look to him, and
what wrought so upon my imagination concerning this man,
was a frightful scar crossing his left cheek and forehead. He
had been almost mortally wounded, they said, with a sabrecut,
during a frigate engagement in the last war with Britain.

He was the most methodical, exact, and punctual of all
the forward officers. Among his other duties, it pertained to
him, while in harbor, to see that at a certain hour in the
evening one of the great guns was discharged from the fore-castle,
a ceremony only observed in a flag-ship. And always
at the precise moment you might behold him blowing his
match, then applying it; and with that booming thunder in
his ear, and the smell of the powder in his hair, he retired to
his hammock for the night. What dreams he must have
had!

The same precision was observed when ordered to fire a
gun to bring to some ship at sea; for, true to their name,
and preserving its applicability, even in times of peace, all
men-of-war are great bullies on the high seas. They domineer
over the poor merchantmen, and with a hissing hot ball
sent bowling across the ocean, compel them to stop their
headway at pleasure.

It was enough to make you a man of method for life, to
see the gunner superintending his subalterns, when preparing
the main-deck batteries for a great national salute. While
lying in harbor, intelligence reached us of the lamentable
casualty that befell certain high officers of state, including

[figure description] Page 156.[end figure description]

the acting Secretary of the Navy himself, some other member
of the President's cabinet, a Commodore, and others, all
engaged in experimenting upon a new-fangled engine of war.
At the same time with the receipt of this sad news, orders
arrived to fire minute-guns for the deceased head of the naval
department. Upon this occasion the gunner was more than
usually ceremonious, in seeing that the long twenty-fours
were thoroughly loaded and rammed down, and then accurately
marked with chalk, so as to be discharged in undeviating
rotation, first from the larboard side, and then from the
starboard.

But as my ears hummed, and all my bones danced in me
with the reverberating din, and my eyes and nostrils were
almost suffocated with the smoke, and when I saw this grim
old gunner firing away so solemnly, I thought it a strange
mode of honoring a man's memory who had himself been
slaughtered by a cannon. Only the smoke, that, after rolling
in at the port-holes, rapidly drifted away to leeward, and
was lost to view, seemed truly emblematical touching the
personage thus honored, since that great non-combatant, the
Bible, assures us that our life is but a vapor, that quickly
passeth away.

p277-162 CHAPTER XXXII. A DISH OF DUNDERFUNK.

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In men-of-war, the space on the uppermost deck, round
about the main-mast, is the Police-office, Court-house, and
yard of execution, where all charges are lodged, causes tried,
and punishment administered. In frigate phrase, to be brought
up to the mast, is equivalent to being presented before the
grand-jury, to see whether a true bill will be found against you.

From the merciless, inquisitorial baiting, which sailors,
charged with offences, too often experience at the mast, that
vicinity is usually known among them as the bull-ring.

The main-mast, moreover, is the only place where the sailor
can hold formal communication with the captain and officers.
If any one has been robbed; if any one has been evilly
entreated; if any one's character has been defamed; if any
one has a request to present; if any one has aught important
for the executive of the ship to know—straight to the mainmast
he repairs; and stands there—generally with his hat
off—waiting the pleasure of the officer of the deck, to advance
and communicate with him. Often, the most ludicrous scenes
occur, and the most comical complaints are made.

One clear, cold morning, while we were yet running away
from the Cape, a raw-boned, crack-pated Down Easter, belonging
to the Waist, made his appearance at the mast, dolefully
exhibiting a blackened tin pan, bearing a few crusty
traces of some sort of a sea-pie, which had been cooked in it.

“Well, sir, what now?” said the Lieutenant of the Deck,
advancing.

“They stole it, sir; all my nice dunderfunk, sir; they did,
sir,” whined the Down Easter, ruefully holding up his pan.

“Stole your dundlefunk! what's that?”

[figure description] Page 158.[end figure description]

“Dunderfunk, sir, dunderfunk; a cruel nice dish as ever
man put into him.”

“Speak out, sir; what's the matter?”

“My dunderfunk, sir—as elegant a dish of dunderfunk as
you ever see, sir—they stole it, sir!”

“Go forward, you rascal!” cried the Lieutenant, in a towering
rage, “or else stop your whining. Tell me, what's the
matter?”

“Why, sir, them 'ere two fellows, Dobs and Hodnose, stole
my dunderfunk.”

“Once more, sir, I ask what that dundledunk is? Speak!”

“As cruel a nice—”

“Be off, sir! sheer!” and muttering something about non
compos mentis, the Lieutenant stalked away; while the
Down Easter beat a melancholy retreat, holding up his pan
like a tambourine, and making dolorous music on it as he went.

“Where are you going with that tear in your eye, like a
traveling rat?” cried a top-man.

“Oh! he's going home to Down East,” said another; “so
far eastward, you know, shippy, that they have to pry up the
sun with a handspike.”

To make this anecdote plainer, be it said that, at sea, the
monotonous round of salt beef and pork at the messes of the
sailors—where but very few of the varieties of the season are
to be found—induces them to adopt many contrivances in
order to diversify their meals. Hence the various sea-rolls,
made dishes, and Mediterranean pies, well known by man-of-war's-men—
Scouse, Lob-scouse, Soft-Tack, Soft-Tommy,
Skillagalee, Burgoo, Dough-boys, Lob-Dominion, Dog's-Body,
and lastly, and least known, Dunderfunk; all of which
come under the general denomination of Manavalins.

Dunderfunk is made of hard biscuit, hashed and pounded,
mixed with beef fat, molasses, and water, and baked brown
in a pan. And to those who are beyond all reach of shore
delicacies, this dunderfunk, in the feeling language of the
Down Easter, is certainly “a cruel nice dish.”

[figure description] Page 159.[end figure description]

Now the only way that a sailor, after preparing his dunderfunk,
could get it cooked on board the Neversink, was by slily
going to Old Coffee, the ship's cook, and bribing him to put
it into his oven. And as some such dishes or other are well
known to be all the time in the oven, a set of unprincipled
gourmands are constantly on the look-out for the chance of
stealing them. Generally, two or three league together, and
while one engages Old Coffee in some interesting conversation
touching his wife and family at home, another snatches the
first thing he can lay hands on in the oven, and rapidly passes
it to the third man, who at his earliest leisure disappears
with it.

In this manner had the Down Easter lost his precious pie,
and afterward found the empty pan knocking about the fore-castle.

p277-165 CHAPTER XXXIII. A FLOGGING.

[figure description] Page 160.[end figure description]

If you begin the day with a laugh, you may, nevertheless,
end it with a sob and a sigh.

Among the many who were exceedingly diverted with the
scene between the Down Easter and the Lieutenant, none
laughed more heartily than John, Peter, Mark, and Antone—
four sailors of the starboard-watch. The same evening these
four found themselves prisoners in the “brig,” with a sentry
standing over them. They were charged with violating a
well-known law of the ship—having been engaged in one of
those tangled, general fights sometimes occurring among sailors.
They had nothing to anticipate but a flogging, at the
captain's pleasure.

Toward evening of the next day, they were startled by the
dread summons of the boatswain and his mates at the principal
hatchway—a summons that ever sends a shudder through
every manly heart in a frigate:

“All hands witness punishment, ahoy!”

The hoarseness of the cry, its unrelenting prolongation, its
being caught up at different points, and sent through the
lowermost depths of the ship; all this produces a most dismal
effect upon every heart not calloused by long habituation
to it.

However much you may desire to absent yourself from the
scene that ensues, yet behold it you must; or, at least, stand
near it you must; for the regulations enjoin the attendance
of the entire ship's company, from the corpulent Captain himself
to the smallest boy who strikes the bell.

“All hands witness punishment, ahoy!”

[figure description] Page 161.[end figure description]

To the sensitive seaman that summons sounds like a doom.
He knows that the same law which impels it—the same law
by which the culprits of the day must suffer; that by that
very law he also is liable at any time to be judged and condemned.
And the inevitableness of his own presence at the
scene; the strong arm that drags him in view of the scourge,
and holds him there till all is over; forcing upon his loathing
eye and soul the sufferings and groans of men who have
familiarly consorted with him, eaten with him, battled out
watches with him—men of his own type and badge—all this
conveys a terrible hint of the omnipotent authority under
which he lives. Indeed, to such a man the naval summons
to witness punishment carries a thrill, somewhat akin to what
we may impute to the quick and the dead, when they shall
hear the Last Trump, that is to bid them all arise in their
ranks, and behold the final penalties inflicted upon the sinners
of our race.

But it must not be imagined that to all men-of-war's-men
this summons conveys such poignant emotions; but it is hard
to decide whether one should be glad or sad that this is not
the case; whether it is grateful to know that so much pain
is avoided, or whether it is far sadder to think that, either
from constitutional hard-heartedness or the multiplied searings
of habit, hundreds of men-of-war's-men have been made
proof against the sense of degradation, pity, and shame.

As if in sympathy with the scene to be enacted, the sun,
which the day previous had merrily flashed upon the tin pan of
the disconsolate Down Easter, was now setting over the dreary
waters, veiling itself in vapors. The wind blew hoarsely in
the cordage; the seas broke heavily against the bows; and
the frigate, staggering under whole top-sails, strained as in
agony on her way.

“All hands witness punishment, ahoy!”

At the summons the crew crowded round the main-mast;
multitudes eager to obtain a good place on the booms, to overlook
the scene; many laughing and chatting, others

[figure description] Page 162.[end figure description]

canvassing the case of the culprits; some maintaining sad, anxious
countenances, or carrying a suppressed indignation in their
eyes; a few purposely keeping behind to avoid looking on;
in short, among five hundred men, there was every possible
shade of character.

All the officers—midshipmen included—stood together in
a group on the starboard side of the main-mast; the First
Lieutenant in advance, and the surgeon, whose special duty
it is to be present at such times, standing close by his side.

Presently the Captain came forward from his cabin, and
stood in the centre of this solemn group, with a small paper
in his hand. That paper was the daily report of offences,
regularly laid upon his table every morning or evening, like
the day's journal placed by a bachelor's napkin at breakfast.

“Master-at-arms, bring up the prisoners,” he said.

A few moments elapsed, during which the Captain, now
clothed in his most dreadful attributes, fixed his eyes severely
upon the crew, when suddenly a lane formed through the
crowd of seamen, and the prisoners advanced—the master-at-arms,
rattan in hand, on one side, and an armed marine on
the other—and took up their stations at the mast.

“You John, you Peter, you Mark, you Antone,” said the
Captain, “were yesterday found fighting on the gun-deck.
Have you any thing to say?”

Mark and Antone, two steady, middle-aged men, whom I
had often admired for their sobriety, replied that they did not
strike the first blow; that they had submitted to much before
they had yielded to their passions; but as they acknowledged
that they had at last defended themselves, their excuse
was overruled.

John—a brutal bully, who, it seems, was the real author
of the disturbance—was about entering into a long extenuation,
when he was cut short by being made to confess, irrespective
of circumstances, that he had been in the fray.

Peter, a handsome lad about nineteen years old, belonging
to the mizzen-top, looked pale and tremulous. He was a great

[figure description] Page 163.[end figure description]

favorite in his part of the ship, and especially in his own mess,
principally composed of lads of his own age. That morning
two of his young mess-mates had gone to his bag, taken out
his best clothes, and, obtaining the permission of the marine
sentry at the “brig,” had handed them to him, to be put on
against being summoned to the mast. This was done to propitiate
the Captain, as most captains love to see a tidy sailor.
But it would not do. To all his supplications the Captain
turned a deaf ear. Peter declared that he had been struck
twice before he had returned a blow. “No matter,” said the
Captain, “you struck at last, instead of reporting the case to
an officer. I allow no man to fight on board here but myself.
I do the fighting.”

“Now, men,” he added, “you all admit the charge; you
know the penalty. Strip! Quarter-masters, are the gratings
rigged?”

The gratings are square frames of barred wood-work, sometimes
placed over the hatch-ways. One of these squares was
now laid on the deck, close to the ship's bulwarks, and while
the remaining preparations were being made, the master-at-arms
assisted the prisoners in removing their jackets and
shirts. This done, their shirts were loosely thrown over their
shoulders.

At a sign from the Captain, John, with a shameless leer,
advanced, and stood passively upon the grating, while the
bare-headed old quarter-master, with gray hair streaming in
the wind, bound his feet to the cross-bars, and, stretching out
his arms over his head, secured them to the hammock-nettings
above. He then retreated a little space, standing silent.

Meanwhile, the boatswain stood solemnly on the other side,
with a green bag in his hand, from which taking four instruments
of punishment, he gave one to each of his mates; for a
fresh “cat,” applied by a fresh hand, is the ceremonious privilege
accorded to every man-of-war culprit.

At another sign from the Captain, the master-at-arms, stepping
up, removed the shirt from the prisoner. At this juncture

[figure description] Page 164.[end figure description]

a wave broke against the ship's side, and dashed the spray
over his exposed back. But though the air was piercing cold,
and the water drenched him, John stood still, without a shudder.

The Captain's finger was now lifted, and the first boat-swain's-mate
advanced, combing out the nine tails of his cat
with his hand, and then, sweeping them round his neck,
brought them with the whole force of his body upon the mark.
Again, and again, and again; and at every blow, higher and
higher rose the long, purple bars on the prisoner's back. But
he only bowed over his head, and stood still. Meantime, some
of the crew whispered among themselves in applause of their
ship-mate's nerve; but the greater part were breathlessly
silent as the keen scourge hissed through the wintery air, and
fell with a cutting, wiry sound upon the mark. One dozen
lashes being applied, the man was taken down, and went
among the crew with a smile, saying, “D—n me! it's nothing
when you're used to it! Who wants to fight?”

The next was Antone, the Portuguese. At every blow he
surged from side to side, pouring out a torrent of involuntary
blasphemies. Never before had he been heard to curse.
When cut down, he went among the men, swearing to have
the life of the Captain. Of course, this was unheard by the
officers.

Mark, the third prisoner, only cringed and coughed under
his punishment. He had some pulmonary complaint. He
was off duty for several days after the flogging; but this was
partly to be imputed to his extreme mental misery. It was
his first scourging, and he felt the insult more than the injury.
He became silent and sullen for the rest of the cruise.

The fourth and last was Peter, the mizzen-top lad. He had
often boasted that he had never been degraded at the gang-way.
The day before his cheek had worn its usual red, but
now no ghost was whiter. As he was being secured to the
gratings, and the shudderings and creepings of his dazzlingly
white back were revealed, he turned round his head

[figure description] Page 165.[end figure description]

imploringly; but his weeping entreaties and vows of contrition were
of no avail. “I would not forgive God Almighty!” cried the
Captain. The fourth boatswain's-mate advanced, and at the
first blow, the boy, shouting “My God! Oh! my God!”
writhed and leaped so as to displace the gratings, and scatter
the nine tails of the scourge all over his person. At the next
blow he howled, leaped, and raged in unendurable torture.

“What are you stopping for, boatswain's-mate?” cried the
Captain. “Lay on!” and the whole dozen was applied.

“I don't care what happens to me now!” wept Peter, going
among the crew, with blood-shot eyes, as he put on his
shirt. “I have been flogged once, and they may do it again,
if they will. Let them look out for me now!”

“Pipe down!” cried the Captain, and the crew slowly dispersed.

Let us have the charity to believe them—as we do—when
some Captains in the Navy say, that the thing of all others
most repulsive to them, in the routine of what they consider
their duty, is the administration of corporal punishment upon
the crew; for, surely, not to feel scarified to the quick at
these scenes would argue a man but a beast.

You see a human being, stripped like a slave; scourged
worse than a hound. And for what? For things not essentially
criminal, but only made so by arbitrary laws.

p277-171 CHAPTER XXXIV. SOME OF THE EVIL EFFECTS OF FLOGGING.

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There are incidental considerations touching this matter
of flogging, which exaggerate the evil into a great enormity.
Many illustrations might be given, but let us be content with
a few.

One of the arguments advanced by officers of the Navy in
favor of corporal punishment is this: it can be inflicted in a
moment; it consumes no valuable time; and when the prisoner's
shirt is put on, that is the last of it. Whereas, if another
punishment were substituted, it would probably occasion
a great waste of time and trouble, besides thereby begetting
in the sailor an undue idea of his importance.

Absurd, or worse than absurd, as it may appear, all this is
true; and if you start from the same premises with these officers,
you must admit that they advance an irresistible argument.
But in accordance with this principle, captains in the
Navy, to a certain extent, inflict the scourge—which is ever
at hand—for nearly all degrees of transgression. In offences
not cognizable by a court martial, little, if any, discrimination
is shown. It is of a piece with the penal laws that prevailed
in England some sixty years ago, when one hundred and sixty
different offences were declared by the statute-book to be capital,
and the servant-maid who but pilfered a watch was hung
beside the murderer of a family.

It is one of the most common punishments for very trivial
offences in the Navy, to “stop” a seaman's grog for a day or
a week. And as most seamen so cling to their grog, the loss
of it is generally deemed by them a very serious penalty. You
will sometimes hear them say, “I would rather have my
wind stopped than my grog!”

[figure description] Page 167.[end figure description]

But there are some sober seamen that would much rather
draw the money for it, instead of the grog itself, as provided
by law; but they are too often deterred from this by the
thought of receiving a scourging for some inconsiderable offence,
as a substitute for the stopping of their spirits. This is
a most serious obstacle to the cause of temperance in the Navy.
But, in many cases, even the reluctant drawing of his grog can
not exempt a prudent seaman from ignominy; for besides the
formal administering of the “cat” at the gangway for petty
offences, he is liable to the “colt,” or rope's-end, a bit of ratlin-stuff,
indiscriminately applied—without stripping the victim—
at any time, and in any part of the ship, at the merest wink
from the Captain. By an express order of that officer, most
boatswain's mates carry the “colt” coiled in their hats, in
readiness to be administered at a minute's warning upon any
offender. This was the custom in the Neversink. And until
so recent a period as the administration of President Polk,
when the historian Bancroft, Secretary of the Navy, officially
interposed, it was an almost universal thing for the officers of
the watch, at their own discretion, to inflict chastisement
upon a sailor, and this, too, in the face of the ordinance restricting
the power of flogging solely to Captains and Courts
Martial. Nor was it a thing unknown for a Lieutenant, in
a sudden outburst of passion, perhaps inflamed by brandy, or
smarting under the sense of being disliked or hated by the
seamen, to order a whole watch of two hundred and fifty men,
at dead of night, to undergo the indignity of the “colt.”

It is believed that, even at the present day, there are instances
of Commanders still violating the law, by delegating
the power of the colt to subordinates. At all events, it is certain
that, almost to a man, the Lieutenants in the Navy bitterly
rail against the officiousness of Bancroft, in so materially
abridging their usurped functions by snatching the colt from
their hands. At the time, they predicted that this rash and
most ill-judged interference of the Secretary would end in the
breaking up of all discipline in the Navy. But it has not so

[figure description] Page 168.[end figure description]

proved. These officers now predict that, if the “cat” be abolished,
the same unfulfilled prediction would be verified.

Concerning the license with which many captains violate
the express laws laid down by Congress for the government
of the Navy, a glaring instance may be quoted. For upward
of forty years there has been on the American Statute-book a
law prohibiting a Captain from inflicting, on his own authority,
more than twelve lashes at one time. If more are to be
given, the sentence must be passed by a Court Martial. Yet,
for nearly half a century, this law has been frequently, and
with almost perfect impunity, set at naught: though of late,
through the exertions of Bancroft and others, it has been much
better observed than formerly; indeed, at the present day, it
is generally respected. Still, while the Neversink was lying
in a South American port, on the cruise now written of, the
seamen belonging to another American frigate informed us
that their captain sometimes inflicted, upon his own authority,
eighteen and twenty lashes. It is worth while to state
that this frigate was vastly admired by the shore ladies for
her wonderfully neat appearance. One of her forecastle-men
told me that he had used up three jack-knives (charged to him
on the books of the purser) in scraping the belaying-pins and
the combings of the hatchways.

It is singular that while the Lieutenants of the Watch in
American men-of-war so long usurped the power of inflicting
corporal punishment with the colt, few or no similar abuses
were known in the English Navy. And though the captain
of an English armed ship is authorized to inflict, at his own
discretion, more than a dozen lashes (I think three dozen),
yet it is to be doubted whether, upon the whole, there is as
much flogging at present in the English Navy as in the American.
The chivalric Virginian, John Randolph of Roanoke,
declared, in his place in Congress, that on board of the American
man-of-war that carried him out Embassador to Russia
he had witnessed more flogging than had taken place on his
own plantation of five hundred African slaves in ten years

[figure description] Page 169.[end figure description]

Certain it is, from what I have personally seen, that the English
officers, as a general thing, seem to be less disliked by
their crews than the American officers by theirs. The reason
probably is, that many of them, from their station in life, have
been more accustomed to social command; hence, quarter-deck
authority sits more naturally on them. A coarse, vulgar
man, who happens to rise to high naval rank by the exhibition
of talents not incompatible with vulgarity, invariably
proves a tyrant to his crew. It is a thing that American man-of-war's-men
have often observed, that the Lieutenants from
the Southern States, the descendants of the old Virginians,
are much less severe, and much more gentle and gentlemanly
in command, than the Northern officers, as a class.

According to the present laws and usages of the Navy, a
seaman, for the most trivial alleged offences, of which he may
be entirely innocent, must, without a trial, undergo a penalty
the traces whereof he carries to the grave; for to a man-of-war's-man's
experienced eye the marks of a naval scourging
with the “cat” are through life discernible. And with these
marks on his back, this image of his Creator must rise at the
Last Day. Yet so untouchable is true dignity, that there
are cases wherein to be flogged at the gangway is no dishonor;
though, to abase and hurl down the last pride of some
sailor who has piqued him, be sometimes the secret motive,
with some malicious officer, in procuring him to be condemned
to the lash. But this feeling of the innate dignity remaining
untouched, though outwardly the body be scarred for the
whole term of the natural life, is one of the hushed things,
buried among the holiest privacies of the soul; a thing between
a man's God and himself; and forever undiscernible
by our fellow-men, who account that a degradation which
seems so to the corporal eye. But what torments must that
seaman undergo who, while his back bleeds at the gangway,
bleeds agonized drops of shame from his soul! Are we not
justified in immeasurably denouncing this thing? Join hands
with me, then; and, in the name of that Being in whose

[figure description] Page 170.[end figure description]

image the flogged sailor is made, let us demand of Legislators,
by what right they dare profane what God himself accounts
sacred.

Is it lawful for you to scourge a man that is a Roman?
asks the intrepid Apostle, well knowing, as a Roman citizen,
that it was not. And now, eighteen hundred years after, is
it lawful for you, my countrymen, to scourge a man that is an
American? to scourge him round the world in your frigates?

It is to no purpose that you apologetically appeal to the
general depravity of the man-of-war's-man. Depravity in the
oppressed is no apology for the oppressor; but rather an additional
stigma to him, as being, in a large degree, the effect,
and not the cause and justification of oppression.

p277-176 CHAPTER XXXV. FLOGGING NOT LAWFUL.

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It is next to idle, at the present day, merely to denounce
an iniquity. Be ours, then, a different task.

If there are any three things opposed to the genius of the
American Constitution, they are these: irresponsibility in a
judge, unlimited discretionary authority in an executive, and
the union of an irresponsible judge and an unlimited executive
in one person.

Yet by virtue of an enactment of Congress, all the Commodores
in the American Navy are obnoxious to these three charges,
so far as concerns the punishment of the sailor for alleged misdemeanors
not particularly set forth in the Articles of War.

Here is the enactment in question.

XXXII. Of the Articles of War.—“All crimes committed
by persons belonging to the Navy, which are not specified
in the foregoing articles, shall be punished according to the
laws and customs in such cases at sea.”

This is the article that, above all others, puts the scourge
into the hands of the Captain, calls him to no account for its
exercise, and furnishes him with an ample warrant for inflictions
of cruelty upon the common sailor, hardly credible to
landsmen.

By this article the Captain is made a legislator, as well as
a judge and an executive. So far as it goes, it absolutely
leaves to his discretion to decide what things shall be considered
crimes, and what shall be the penalty; whether an accused
person has been guilty of actions by him declared to be crimes;
and how, when, and where the penalty shall be inflicted.

In the American Navy there is an everlasting suspension
of the Habeas Corpus. Upon the bare allegation of

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misconduct, there is no law to restrain the Captain from imprisoning
a seaman, and keeping him confined at his pleasure. While
I was in the Neversink, the Captain of an American sloop
of war, from undoubted motives of personal pique, kept a seaman
confined in the brig for upward of a month.

Certainly the necessities of navies warrant a code for its
government more stringent than the law that governs the
land; but that code should conform to the spirit of the political
institutions of the country that ordains it. It should not
convert into slaves some of the citizens of a nation of freemen.
Such objections can not be urged against the laws of the
Russian Navy (not essentially different from our own), because
the laws of that Navy, creating the absolute one-man
power in the Captain, and vesting in him the authority to
scourge, conform in spirit to the territorial laws of Russia,
which is ruled by an autocrat, and whose courts inflict the
knout upon the subjects of the land. But with us it is different.
Our institutions claim to be based upon broad principles
of political liberty and equality. Whereas, it would hardly
affect one iota the condition on shipboard of an American
man-of-war's-man, were he transferred to the Russian Navy
and made a subject of the Czar.

As a sailor, he shares none of our civil immunities; the law
of our soil in no respect accompanies the national floating timbers
grown thereon, and to which he clings as his home. For
him our Revolution was in vain; to him our Declaration of
Independence is a lie.

It is not sufficiently borne in mind, perhaps, that though
the naval code comes under the head of the martial law, yet,
in time of peace, and in the thousand questions arising between
man and man on board ship, this code, to a certain extent, may
not improperly be deemed municipal. With its crew of 800
or 1000 men, a three-decker is a city on the sea. But in most
of these matters between man and man, the Captain, instead
of being a magistrate, dispensing what the law promulgates,
is an absolute ruler, making and unmaking law as he pleases.

[figure description] Page 173.[end figure description]

It will be seen that the XXth of the Articles of War provides,
that if any person in the Navy negligently perform the
duties assigned him, he shall suffer such punishment as a
court martial shall adjudge; but if the offender be a private
(common sailor), he may, at the discretion of the Captain, be
put in irons or flogged. It is needless to say, that in cases
where an officer commits a trivial violation of this law, a
court martial is seldom or never called to sit upon his trial;
but in the sailor's case, he is at once condemned to the lash.
Thus, one set of sea-citizens is exempted from a law that is
hung in terror over others. What would landsmen think,
were the State of New York to pass a law against some offence,
affixing a fine as a penalty, and then add to that law
a section restricting its penal operation to mechanics and day
laborers, exempting all gentlemen with an income of one
thousand dollars? Yet thus, in the spirit of its practical operation,
even thus, stands a good part of the naval laws wherein
naval flogging is involved.

But a law should be “universal,” and include in its possible
penal operations the very judge himself who gives decisions
upon it; nay, the very judge who expounds it. Had Sir
William Blackstone violated the laws of England, he would
have been brought before the bar over which he had presided,
and would there have been tried, with the counsel for the
crown reading to him, perhaps, from a copy of his own Commentaries.
And should he have been found guilty, he would
have suffered like the meanest subject, “according to law.”

How is it in an American frigate? Let one example suffice.
By the Articles of War, and especially by Article I.,
an American Captain may, and frequently does, inflict a severe
and degrading punishment upon a sailor, while he himself
is forever removed from the possibility of undergoing the
like disgrace; and, in all probability, from undergoing any
punishment whatever, even if guilty of the same thing—contention
with his equals, for instance—for which he punishes
another. Yet both sailor and captain are American citizens.

[figure description] Page 174.[end figure description]

Now, in the language of Blackstone, again, there is a law,
“coeval with mankind, dictated by God himself, superior in
obligation to any other, and no human laws are of any validity
if contrary to this.” That law is the Law of Nature;
among the three great principles of which Justinian includes
“that to every man should be rendered his due.” But we
have seen that the laws involving flogging in the Navy do
not render to every man his due, since in some cases they
indirectly exclude the officers from any punishment whatever,
and in all cases protect them from the scourge, which is inflicted
upon the sailor. Therefore, according to Blackstone
and Justinian, those laws have no binding force; and every
American man-of-war's-man would be morally justified in resisting
the scourge to the uttermost; and, in so resisting,
would be religiously justified in what would be judicially
styled “the act of mutiny” itself.

If, then, these scourging laws be for any reason necessary,
make them binding upon all who of right come under their
sway; and let us see an honest Commodore, duly authorized
by Congress, condemning to the lash a transgressing Captain
by the side of a transgressing sailor. And if the Commodore
himself prove a transgressor, let us see one of his brother
Commodores take up the lash against him, even as the
boatswain's mates, the navy executioners, are often called
upon to scourge each other.

Or will you say that a navy officer is a man, but that an
American-born citizen, whose grandsire may have ennobled
him by pouring out his blood at Bunker Hill—will you say
that, by entering the service of his country as a common seaman,
and standing ready to fight her foes, he thereby loses
his manhood at the very time he most asserts it? Will you
say that, by so doing, he degrades himself to the liability of
the scourge, but if he tarries ashore in time of danger, he is
safe from that indignity? All our linked states, all four
continents of mankind, unite in denouncing such a thought.

We plant the question, then, on the topmost argument of all.

[figure description] Page 175.[end figure description]

Irrespective of incidental considerations, we assert that flogging
in the navy is opposed to the essential dignity of man,
which no legislator has a right to violate; that it is oppressive,
and glaringly unequal in its operations; that it is utterly
repugnant to the spirit of our democratic institutions; indeed,
that it involves a lingering trait of the worst times of a barbarous
feudal aristocracy; in a word, we denounce it as religiously,
morally, and immutably wrong.

No matter, then, what may be the consequences of its abolition;
no matter if we have to dismantle our fleets, and our
unprotected commerce should fall a prey to the spoiler, the
awful admonitions of justice and humanity demand that abolition
without procrastination; in a voice that is not to be
mistaken, demand that abolition to-day. It is not a dollar-and-cent
question of expediency; it is a matter of right and
wrong. And if any man can lay his hand on his heart, and
solemnly say that this scourging is right, let that man but
once feel the lash on his own back, and in his agony you
will hear the apostate call the seventh heavens to witness
that it is wrong. And, in the name of immortal manhood,
would to God that every man who upholds this thing were
scourged at the gangway till he recanted.

p277-181 CHAPTER XXXVI. FLOGGING NOT NECESSARY.

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But White-Jacket is ready to come down from the lofty
mast-head of an eternal principle, and fight you—Commodores
and Captains of the navy—on your own quarter-deck,
with your own weapons, at your own paces.

Exempt yourselves from the lash, you take Bible oaths to
it that it is indispensable for others; you swear that, without
the lash, no armed ship can be kept in suitable discipline.
Be it proved to you, officers, and stamped upon your foreheads,
that herein you are utterly wrong.

“Send them to Collingwood,” said Lord Nelson, “and he
will bring them to order.” This was the language of that
renowned Admiral, when his officers reported to him certain
seamen of the fleet as wholly ungovernable. “Send them to
Collingwood.” And who was Collingwood, that, after these
navy rebels had been imprisoned and scourged without being
brought to order, Collingwood could convert them to docility?

Who Admiral Collingwood was, as an historical hero, history
herself will tell you; nor, in whatever triumphal hall
they may be hanging, will the captured flags of Trafalgar fail
to rustle at the mention of that name. But what Collingwood
was as a disciplinarian on board the ships he commanded
perhaps needs to be said. He was an officer, then, who
held in abhorrence all corporal punishment; who, though
seeing more active service than any sea-officer of his time,
yet, for years together, governed his men without inflicting
the lash.

But these seamen of his must have been most exemplary
saints to have proved docile under so lenient a sway. Were

[figure description] Page 177.[end figure description]

they saints? Answer, ye jails and alms-houses throughout
the length and breadth of Great Britain, which, in Collingwood's
time, were swept clean of the last lingering villain and
pauper to man his majesty's fleets.

Still more, that was a period when the uttermost resources
of England were taxed to the quick; when the masts of her
multiplied fleets almost transplanted her forests, all standing
to the sea; when British press-gangs not only boarded foreign
ships on the high seas, and boarded foreign pier-heads,
but boarded their own merchantmen at the mouth of the
Thames, and boarded the very fire-sides along its banks;
when Englishmen were knocked down and dragged into the
navy, like cattle into the slaughter-house, with every mortal
provocation to a mad desperation against the service that thus
ran their unwilling heads into the muzzles of the enemy's cannon.
This was the time, and these the men that Collingwood
governed without the lash.

I know it has been said that Lord Collingwood began by
inflicting severe punishments, and afterward ruling his sailors
by the mere memory of a by-gone terror, which he could at
pleasure revive; and that his sailors knew this, and hence
their good behavior under a lenient sway. But, granting the
quoted assertion to be true, how comes it that many American
Captains, who, after inflicting as severe punishment as
ever Collingwood could have authorized—how comes it that
they, also, have not been able to maintain good order without
subsequent floggings, after once showing to the crew with
what terrible attributes they were invested? But it is notorious,
and a thing that I myself, in several instances, know to
have been the case, that in the American navy, where corporal
punishment has been most severe, it has also been most frequent.

But it is incredible that, with such crews as Lord Collingwood's—
composed, in part, of the most desperate characters,
the rakings of the jails—it is incredible that such a set of men
could have been governed by the mere memory of the lash.
Some other influence must have been brought to bear;

[figure description] Page 178.[end figure description]

mainly, no doubt, the influence wrought by a powerful brain, and
a determined, intrepid spirit over a miscellaneous rabble.

It is well known that Lord Nelson himself, in point of policy,
was averse to flogging; and that, too, when he had witnessed
the mutinous effects of government abuses in the navy—
unknown in our times—and which, to the terror of all England,
developed themselves at the great mutiny of the Nore:
an outbreak that for several weeks jeopardized the very existence
of the British navy.

But we may press this thing nearly two centuries further
back, for it is a matter of historical doubt whether, in Robert
Blake's time, Cromwell's great admiral, such a thing as flogging
was known at the gangways of his victorious fleets. And
as in this matter we can not go further back than to Blake,
so we can not advance further than to our own time, which
shows Commodore Stockton, during the recent war with Mexico,
governing the American squadron in the Pacific without
employing the scourge.

But if of three famous English Admirals one has abhorred
flogging, another almost governed his ships without it, and to
the third it may be supposed to have been unknown, while an
American Commander has, within the present year almost,
been enabled to sustain the good discipline of an entire squadron
in time of war without having an instrument of scourging
on board, what inevitable inferences must be drawn, and how
disastrous to the mental character of all advocates of navy
flogging, who may happen to be navy officers themselves.

It can not have escaped the discernment of any observer
of mankind, that, in the presence of its conventional inferiors,
conscious imbecility in power often seeks to carry off that imbecility
by assumptions of lordly severity. The amount of
flogging on board an American man-of-war is, in many cases,
in exact proportion to the professional and intellectual incapacity
of her officers to command. Thus, in these cases, the law
that authorizes flogging does but put a scourge into the hand
of a fool. In most calamitous instances this has been shown.

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It is a matter of record, that some English ships of war
have fallen a prey to the enemy through the insubordination
of the crew, induced by the witless cruelty of their officers;
officers so armed by the law that they could inflict that cruelty
without restraint. Nor have there been wanting instances
where the seamen have ran away with their ships, as in the
case of the Hermione and Danae, and forever rid themselves
of the outrageous inflictions of their officers by sacrificing their
lives to their fury.

Events like these aroused the attention of the British public
at the time. But it was a tender theme, the public agitation
of which the government was anxious to suppress. Nevertheless,
whenever the thing was privately discussed, these
terrific mutinies, together with the then prevailing insubordination
of the men in the navy, were almost universally attributed
to the exasperating system of flogging. And the necessity
for flogging was generally believed to be directly referable
to the impressment of such crowds of dissatisfied men.
And in high quarters it was held that if, by any mode, the
English fleet could be manned without resource to coercive
measures, then the necessity of flogging would cease.

“If we abolish either impressment of flogging, the abolition
of the other will follow as a matter of course.” This was the
language of the Edinburgh Review at a still later period, 1824.

If, then, the necessity of flogging in the British armed marine
was solely attributed to the impressment of the seamen,
what faintest shadow of reason is there for the continuance
of this barbarity in the American service, which is wholly
freed from the reproach of impressment?

It is true that, during a long period of non-impressment,
and even down to the present day, flogging has been, and still
is, the law of the English navy. But in things of this kind
England should be nothing to us, except an example to be
shunned. Nor should wise legislators wholly govern themselves
by precedents, and conclude that, since scourging has
so long prevailed, some virtue must reside in it. Not so. The

[figure description] Page 180.[end figure description]

world has arrived at a period which renders it the part of
Wisdom to pay homage to the prospective precedents of the
Future in preference to those of the Past. The Past is dead,
and has no resurrection; but the Future is endowed with such
a life, that it lives to us even in anticipation. The Past is, in
many things, the foe of mankind; the Future is, in all things,
our friend. In the Past is no hope; the Future is both hope
and fruition. The Past is the text-book of tyrants; the Future
the Bible of the Free. Those who are solely governed
by the Past stand like Lot's wife, crystallized in the act of
looking backward, and forever incapable of looking before.

Let us leave the Past, then, to dictate laws to immovable
China; let us abandon it to the Chinese Legitimists of Europe.
But for us, we will have another captain to rule over
us—that captain who ever marches at the head of his troop
and beckons them forward, not lingering in the rear, and impeding
their march with lumbering baggage-wagons of old
precedents. This is the Past.

But in many things we Americans are driven to a rejection
of the maxims of the Past, seeing that, ere long, the van of
the nations must, of right, belong to ourselves. There are
occasions when it is for America to make precedents, and not
to obey them. We should, if possible, prove a teacher to posterity,
instead of being the pupil of by-gone generations.
More shall come after us than have gone before; the world
is not yet middle-aged.

Escaped from the house of bondage, Israel of old did not
follow after the ways of the Egyptians. To her was given an
express dispensation; to her were given new things under the
sun. And we Americans are the peculiar, chosen people—
the Israel of our time; we bear the ark of the liberties of the
world. Seventy years ago we escaped from thrall; and, besides
our first birth-right—embracing one continent of earth—
God has given to us, for a future inheritance, the broad domains
of the political pagans, that shall yet come and lie down
under the shade of our ark, without bloody hands being lifted.

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God has predestinated, mankind expects, great things from
our race; and great things we feel in our souls. The rest of
the nations must soon be in our rear. We are the pioneers
of the world; the advance-guard, sent on through the wilderness
of untried things, to break a new path in the New World
that is ours. In our youth is our strength; in our inexperience,
our wisdom. At a period when other nations have but
lisped, our deep voice is heard afar. Long enough have we
been skeptics with regard to ourselves, and doubted whether,
indeed, the political Messiah had come. But he has come in
us, if we would but give utterance to his promptings. And
let us always remember that with ourselves, almost for the
first time in the history of earth, national selfishness is unbounded
philanthropy; for we can not do a good to America
but we give alms to the world.

p277-187 CHAPTER XXXVII. SOME SUPERIOR OLD “LONDON DOCK” FROM THE WINE-COOLERS OF NEPTUNE.

[figure description] Page 182.[end figure description]

We had just slid into pleasant weather, drawing near to
the Tropics, when all hands were thrown into a wonderful
excitement by an event that eloquently appealed to many
palates.

A man at the fore-top-sail-yard sung out that there were
eight or ten dark objects floating on the sea, some three points
off our lee-bow.

“Keep her off three points!” cried Captain Claret, to the
quarter-master at the cun.

And thus, with all our batteries, store-rooms, and five hundred
men, with their baggage, and beds, and provisions, at one
move of a round bit of mahogany, our great-embattled ark
edged away for the strangers, as easily as a boy turns to the
right or left in pursuit of insects in the field.

Directly the man on the top-sail-yard reported the dark objects
to be hogsheads. Instantly all the top-men were straining
their eyes, in delirious expectation of having their long
grog-fast broken at last, and that, too, by what seemed an
almost miraculous intervention. It was a curious circumstance
that, without knowing the contents of the hogsheads,
they yet seemed certain that the staves encompassed the thing
they longed for.

Sail was now shortened, our headway was stopped, and a
cutter was lowered, with orders to tow the fleet of strangers
alongside. The men sprang to their oars with a will, and
soon five goodly puncheons lay wallowing in the sea, just under
the main-chains. We got overboard the slings, and hoisted
them out of the water.

[figure description] Page 183.[end figure description]

It was a sight that Bacchus and his bacchanals would have
gloated over. Each puncheon was of a deep-green color, so
covered with minute barnacles and shell-fish, and streaming
with sea-weed, that it needed long searching to find out their
bung-holes; they looked like venerable old loggerhead-turtles.
How long they had been tossing about, and making voyages
for the benefit of the flavor of their contents, no one could
tell. In trying to raft them ashore, or on board of some merchant-ship,
they must have drifted off to sea. This we inferred
from the ropes that lengthwise united them, and which,
from one point of view, made them resemble a long sea-serpent.
They were struck into the gun-deck, where the eager
crowd being kept off by sentries, the cooper was called with
his tools.

“Bung up, and bilge free!” he cried, in an ecstasy, flourishing
his driver and hammer.

Upon clearing away the barnacles and moss, a flat sort of
shell-fish was found, closely adhering, like a California-shell,
right over one of the bungs. Doubtless this shell-fish had
there taken up his quarters, and thrown his own body into the
breach, in order the better to preserve the precious contents
of the cask. The by-standers were breathless, when at last
this puncheon was canted over and a tin-pot held to the orifice.
What was to come forth? salt-water or wine? But
a rich purple tide soon settled the question, and the lieutenant
assigned to taste it, with a loud and satisfactory smack of his
lips, pronounced it Port!

“Oporto!” cried Mad Jack, “and no mistake!”

But, to the surprise, grief, and consternation of the sailors,
an order now came from the quarter-deck to “strike the strangers
down into the main-hold!” This proceeding occasioned
all sorts of censorious observations upon the Captain, who, of
course, had authorized it.

It must be related here that, on the passage out from
home, the Neversink had touched at Madeira; and there, as
is often the case with men-of-war, the Commodore and

[figure description] Page 184.[end figure description]

Captain had laid in a goodly stock of wines for their own private
tables, and the benefit of their foreign visitors. And although
the Commodore was a small, spare man, who evidently emptied
but few glasses, yet Captain Claret was a portly gentleman,
with a crimson face, whose father had fought at the
battle of the Brandywine, and whose brother had commanded
the well-known frigate named in honor of that engagement.
And his whole appearance evinced that Captain Claret himself
had fought many Brandywine battles ashore in honor of
his sire's memory, and commanded in many bloodless Brandywine
actions at sea.

It was therefore with some savor of provocation that the
sailors held forth on the ungenerous conduct of Captain
Claret, in stepping in between them and Providence, as it
were, which by this lucky windfall, they held, seemed bent
upon relieving their necessities; while Captain Claret himself,
with an inexhaustible cellar, emptied his Madeira decanters
at his leisure.

But next day all hands were electrified by the old familiar
sound—so long hushed—of the drum rolling to grog.

After that the port was served out twice a day, till all was
expended.

p277-190 CHAPTER XXXVIII. THE CHAPLAIN AND CHAPEL IN A MAN-OF-WAR.

[figure description] Page 185.[end figure description]

The next day was Sunday; a fact set down in the almanae,
spite of merchant seamen's maxim, that there are no
Sundays off soundings.

No Sundays off soundings, indeed! No Sundays on
shipboard! You may as well say there should be no Sundays
in churches; for is not a ship modeled after a church?
has it not three spires—three steeples? yea, and on the gun-deck,
a bell and a belfry? And does not that bell merrily
peal every Sunday morning, to summon the crew to devotions?

At any rate, there were Sundays on board this particular
frigate of ours, and a clergyman also. He was a slender,
middle-aged man, of an amiable deportment and irreproachable
conversation; but I must say, that his sermons were but
ill calculated to benefit the crew. He had drank at the
mystic fountain of Plato; his head had been turned by the
Germans; and this I will say, that White-Jacket himself
saw him with Coleridge's Biographia Literaria in his hand.

Fancy, now, this transcendental divine standing behind a
gun-carriage on the main-deck, and addressing five hundred
salt-sea sinners upon the psychological phenomena of the
soul, and the ontological necessity of every sailor's saving it
at all hazards. He enlarged upon the follies of the ancient
philosophers; learnedly alluded to the Phædon of Plato; exposed
the follies of Simplicius's Commentary on Aristotle's
“De Cælo,” by arraying against that clever Pagan author
the admired tract of Tertullian—De Præscriptionibus Hæ
reticorum—and concluded by a Sanscrit invocation. He was

[figure description] Page 186.[end figure description]

particularly hard upon the Gnostics and Marcionites of the
second century of the Christian era; but he never, in the
remotest manner, attacked the every-day vices of the nineteenth
century, as eminently illustrated in our man-of-war
world. Concerning drunkenness, fighting, flogging, and oppression—
things expressly or impliedly prohibited by Christianity—
he never said aught. But the most mighty Commodore
and Captain sat before him; and in general, if, in a
monarchy, the state form the audience of the church, little
evangelical piety will be preached. Hence, the harmless,
non-committal abstrusities of our Chaplain were not to be
wondered at. He was no Massillon, to thunder forth his
ecclesiastical rhetoric, even when a Louis le Grand was enthroned
among his congregation. Nor did the chaplains who
preached on the quarter-deck of Lord Nelson ever allude to
the guilty Felix, nor to Delilah, nor practically reason of
righteousness, temperance, and judgment to come, when that
renowned Admiral sat, sword-belted, before them.

During these Sunday discourses, the officers always sat in a
circle round the chaplain, and, with a business-like air, steadily
preserved the utmost propriety. In particular, our old
Commodore himself made a point of looking intensely edified;
and not a sailor on board but believed that the Commodore,
being the greatest man present, must alone comprehend the
mystic sentences that fell from our parson's lips.

Of all the noble lords in the ward-room, this lord-spiritual,
with the exception of the Purser, was in the highest favor
with the Commodore, who frequently conversed with him in
a close and confidential manner. Nor, upon reflection, was
this to be marveled at, seeing how efficacious, in all despotic
governments, it is for the throne and altar to go hand-in-hand.

The accommodations of our chapel were very poor. We
had nothing to sit on but the great gun-rammers and capstan-bars,
placed horizontally upon shot-boxes. These seats were
exceedingly uncomfortable, wearing out our trowsers and our

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tempers, and, no doubt, impeded the conversion of many valuable
souls.

To say the truth, man-of-war's-men, in general, make but
poor auditors upon these occasions, and adopt every possible
means to elude them. Often the boatswain's-mates were
obliged to drive the men to service, violently swearing upon
these occasions, as upon every other.

“Go to prayers, d—n you! To prayers, you rascals—to
prayers!” In this clerical invitation Captain Claret would
frequently unite.

At this Jack Chase would sometimes make merry. “Come,
boys, don't hang back,” he would say; “come, let us go hear
the parson talk about his Lord High Admiral Plato, and Commodore
Socrates.”

But, in one instance, grave exception was taken to this
summons. A remarkably serious, but bigoted seaman, a sheet-anchor-man—
whose private devotions may hereafter be alluded
to—once touched his hat to the Captain, and respectfully
said, “Sir, I am a Baptist; the chaplain is an Episcopalian;
his form of worship is not mine; I do not believe with him,
and it is against my conscience to be under his ministry.
May I be allowed, sir, not to attend service on the half-deck?”

“You will be allowed, sir!” said the Captain, haughtily,
“to obey the laws of the ship. If you absent yourself from
prayers on Sunday mornings, you know the penalty.”

According to the Articles of War, the Captain was perfectly
right; but if any law requiring an American to attend
divine service against his will be a law respecting the establishment
of religion, then the Articles of War are, in this one
particular, opposed to the American Constitution, which expressly
says, “Congress shall make no law respecting the establishment
of religion, or the free exercise thereof.” But this is
only one of several things in which the Articles of War are
repugnant to that instrument. They will be glanced at in another
part of the narrative.

The motive which prompts the introduction of chaplains

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into the Navy can not but be warmly responded to by every
Christian. But it does not follow, that because chaplains
are to be found in men-of-war, that, under the present system,
they achieve much good, or that, under any other, they
ever will.

How can it be expected that the religion of peace should
flourish in an oaken castle of war? How can it be expected
that the clergyman, whose pulpit is a forty-two-pounder, should
convert sinners to a faith that enjoins them to turn the right
cheek when the left is smitten? How is it to be expected
that when, according to the XLII. of the Articles of War,
as they now stand unrepealed on the Statute Book, “a bounty
shall be paid” (to the officers and crew) “by the United States
government of $20 for each person on board any ship of an
enemy which shall be sunk or destroyed by any United States
ship;” and when, by a subsequent section (vii.), it is provided,
among other apportionings, that the chaplain shall receive
“two twentieths” of this price paid for sinking and destroying
ships full of human beings? How is it to be expected
that a clergyman, thus provided for, should prove efficacious
in enlarging upon the criminality of Judas, who, for thirty
pieces of silver, betrayed his Master?

Although, by the regulations of the Navy, each seaman's
mess on board the Neversink was furnished with a Bible, these
Bibles were seldom or never to be seen, except on Sunday
mornings, when usage demands that they shall be exhibited
by the cooks of the messes, when the master-at-arms goes his
rounds on the berth-deck. At such times, they usually surmounted
a highly polished tin-pot placed on the lid of the
chest.

Yet, for all this, the Christianity of man-of-war's-men, and
their disposition to contribute to pious enterprises, are often
relied upon. Several times subscription papers were circulated
among the crew of the Neversink, while in harbor, under
the direct patronage of the Chaplain. One was for the purpose
of building a seaman's chapel in China; another to pay

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the salary of a tract-distributor in Greece; a third to raise
a fund for the benefit of an African Colonization Society.

Where the Captain himself is a moral man, he makes a
far better chaplain for his crew than any clergyman can be.
This is sometimes illustrated in the case of sloops of war and
armed brigs, which are not allowed a regular chaplain. I
have known one crew, who were warmly attached to a naval
commander worthy of their love, who have mustered even
with alacrity to the call to prayer; and when their Captain
would read the Church of England service to them, would
present a congregation not to be surpassed for earnestness and
devotion by any Scottish Kirk. It seemed like family devotions,
where the head of the house is foremost in confessing
himself before his Maker. But our own hearts are our best
prayer-rooms, and the chaplains who can most help us are ourselves.

p277-195 CHAPTER XXXIX. THE FRIGATE IN HARBOR. —THE BOATS. —GRAND STATE RECEPTION OF THE COMMODORE.

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In good time we were up with the parallel of Rio de Janeiro,
and, standing in for the land, the mist soon cleared; and
high aloft the famed Sugar Loaf pinnacle was seen, our bowsprit
pointing for it straight as a die.

As we glided on toward our anchorage, the bands of the
various men-of-war in harbor saluted us with national airs,
and gallantly lowered their ensigns. Nothing can exceed the
courteous etiquette of these ships, of all nations, in greeting
their brethren. Of all men, your accomplished duellist is generally
the most polite.

We lay in Rio some weeks, lazily taking in stores and
otherwise preparing for the passage home. But though Rio
is one of the most magnificent bays in the world; though
the city itself contains many striking objects; and though
much might be said of the Sugar Loaf and Signal Hill
heights; and the little islet of Lucia; and the fortified Ihla
Dos Cobras, or Isle of the Snakes (though the only anacondas
and adders now found in the arsenals there are great guns
and pistols); and Lord Wood's Nose—a lofty eminence said
by seamen to resemble his lordship's conch-shell; and the
Prays do Flamingo—a noble tract of beach, so called from its
having been the resort, in olden times, of those gorgeous birds;
and the charming Bay of Botofogo, which, spite of its name,
is fragrant as the neighboring Larangieros, or Valley of the
Oranges; and the green Gloria Hill, surmounted by the belfries
of the queenly Church of Nossa Senora de Gloria; and
the iron-gray Benedictine convent near by; and the fine drive

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and promenade, Passeo Publico; and the massive arch-over-arch
aqueduct, Arcos de Carico; and the Emperor's Palace;
and the Empress's Gardens; and the fine Church de Candelaria;
and the gilded throne on wheels, drawn by eight silken,
silver-belled mules, in which, of pleasant evenings, his Imperial
Majesty is driven out of town to his Moorish villa of St.
Christova—ay, though much might be said of all this, yet
must I forbear, if I may, and adhere to my one proper object,
the world in a man-of-war.

Behold, now, the Neversink under a new aspect. With
all her batteries, she is tranquilly lying in harbor, surrounded
by English, French, Dutch, Portuguese, and Brazilian seventy-fours,
moored in the deep-green water, close under the
lee of that oblong, castellated mass of rock, Ilha Dos Cobras,
which, with its port-holes and lofty flag-staffs, looks like another
man-of-war, fast anchored in the bay. But what is an
insular fortress, indeed, but an embattled land-slide into the
sea from the world Gibraltars and Quebecs? And what a
main-land fortress but a few decks of a line-of-battle ship
transplanted ashore? They are all one—all, as King David,
men-of-war from their youth.

Ay, behold now the Neversink at her anchors, in many
respects presenting a different appearance from what she presented
at sea. Nor is the routine of life on board the same.

At sea there is more to employ the sailors, and less temptation
to violations of the law. Whereas, in port, unless some
particular service engages them, they lead the laziest of lives,
beset by all the allurements of the shore, though perhaps that
shore they may never touch.

Unless you happen to belong to one of the numerous boats,
which, in a man-of-war in harbor, are continually plying to
and from the land, you are mostly thrown upon your own resources
to while away the time. Whole days frequently
pass without your being individually called upon to lift a
finger; for though, in the merchant-service, they make a
point of keeping the men always busy about something or

[figure description] Page 192.[end figure description]

other, yet, to employ five hundred sailors when there is nothing
definite to be done wholly surpasses the ingenuity of any First
Lieutenant in the Navy.

As mention has just been made of the numerous boats employed
in harbor, something more may as well be put down
concerning them. Our frigate carried a very large boat—as
big as a small sloop—called a launch, which was generally
used for getting off wood, water, and other bulky articles.
Besides this, she carried four boats of an arithmetical progression
in point of size—the largest being known as the first cutter,
the next largest the second cutter, then the third and
fourth cutters. She also carried a Commodore's Barge, a
Captain's Gig, and a “dingy,” a small yawl, with a crew of
apprentice boys. All these boats, except the “dingy,” had
their regular crews, who were subordinate to their cockswains—
petty officers, receiving pay in addition to their seaman's
wages.

The launch was manned by the old Tritons of the fore-castle,
who were no ways particular about their dress, while
the other boats—commissioned for genteeler duties—were
rowed by young fellows, mostly, who had a dandy eye to their
personal appearance. Above all, the officers see to it that
the Commodore's Barge and the Captain's Gig are manned
by gentlemanly youths, who may do credit to their country,
and form agreeable objects for the eyes of the Commodore or
Captain to repose upon as he tranquilly sits in the stern, when
pulled ashore by his barge-men or gig-men, as the case may
be. Some sailors are very fond of belonging to the boats, and
deem it a great honor to be a Commodore's bargeman; but
others, perceiving no particular distinction in that office, do
not court it so much.

On the second day after arriving at Rio, one of the gig-men
fell sick, and, to my no small concern, I found myself
temporarily appointed to his place.

“Come, White-Jacket, rig yourself in white—that's the
gig's uniform to-day; you are a gig-man, my boy—give ye

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joy!” This was the first announcement of the fact that I
heard; but soon after it was officially ratified.

I was about to seek the First Lieutenant, and plead the
scantiness of my wardrobe, which wholly disqualified me to
fill so distinguished a station, when I heard the bugler call
away the “gig;” and, without more ado, I slipped into a clean
frock, which a messmate doffed for my benefit, and soon after
found myself pulling off his High Mightiness, the Captain, to
an English seventy-four.

As we were bounding along, the cockswain suddenly cried
“Oars!” At the word every oar was suspended in the air,
while our Commodore's barge floated by, bearing that dignitary
himself. At the sight, Captain Claret removed his chapeau,
and saluted profoundly, our boat laying motionless on
the water. But the barge never stopped; and the Commodore
made but a slight return to the obsequious salute he had
received.

We then resumed rowing, and presently I heard “Oars!”
again; but from another boat, the second cutter, which turned
out to be carrying a Lieutenant ashore. It was now Captain
Claret's turn to be honored. The cutter lay still, and
the Lieutenant off hat; while the Captain only nodded, and
we kept on our way.

This naval etiquette is very much like the etiquette at the
Grand Porte of Constantinople, where, after washing the Sublime
Sultan's feet, the Grand Vizier avenges himself on an
Emir, who does the same office for him.

When we arrived aboard the English seventy-four, the
Captain was received with the usual honors, and the gig's
crew were conducted below, and hospitably regaled with some
spirits, served out by order of the officer of the deck.

Soon after, the English crew went to quarters; and as they
stood up at their guns, all along the main-deck, a row of beeffed
Britons, stalwart-looking fellows, I was struck with the
contrast they afforded to similar sights on board of the Neversink.

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For on board of us our “quarters” showed an array of rather
slender, lean-cheeked chaps. But then I made no doubt,
that, in a sea-tussle, these lantern-jawed varlets would have
approved themselves as slender Damascus blades, nimble and
flexible; whereas these Britons would have been, perhaps, as
sturdy broadswords. Yet every one remembers that story of
Saladin and Richard trying their respective blades; how gallant
Richard clove an anvil in twain, or something quite as
ponderous, and Saladin elegantly severed a cushion; so that
the two monarchs were even—each excelling in his way—
though, unfortunately for my simile, in a patriotic point of
view, Richard whipped Saladin's armies in the end.

There happened to be a lord on board of this ship—the
younger son of an earl, they told me. He was a fine-looking
fellow. I chanced to stand by when he put a question to an
Irish captain of a gun; upon the seaman's inadvertently saying
sir to him, his lordship looked daggers at the slight; and
the sailor, touching his hat a thousand times, said, “Pardon,
your honor; I meant to say my lord, sir!”

I was much pleased with an old white-headed musician,
who stood at the main hatchway, with his enormous bass
drum full before him, and thumping it sturdily to the tune of
“God Save the King!” though small mercy did he have on
his drum-heads. Two little boys were clashing cymbals, and
another was blowing a fife, with his cheeks puffed out like
the plumpest of his country's plum-puddings.