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Though many heads of hair were shorn, and many fine
beards reaped that day, yet several still held out, and vowed
to defend their sacred hair to the last gasp of their breath.
These were chiefly old sailors—some of them petty officers—
who, presuming upon their age or rank, doubtless thought
that, after so many had complied with the Captain's commands,
they, being but a handful, would be exempted from
compliance, and remain a monument of our master's clemency.

That same evening, when the drum beat to quarters, the
sailors went sullenly to their guns, and the old tars who still
sported their beards stood up, grim, defying, and motionless, as
the rows of sculptured Assyrian kings, who, with their magnificent
beards, have recently been exhumed by Layard.

When the proper time arrived, their names were taken
down by the officers of divisions, and they were afterward
summoned in a body to the mast, where the Captain stood
ready to receive them. The whole ship's company crowded
to the spot, and, amid the breathless multitude, the venerable
rebels advanced and unhatted.

It was an imposing display. They were old and venerable
mariners; their cheeks had been burned brown in all
latitudes, wherever the sun sends a tropical ray. Reverend
old tars, one and all; some of them might have been grandsires,
with grandchildren in every port round the world.
They ought to have commanded the veneration of the most
frivolous or magisterial beholder. Even Captain Claret they
ought to have humiliated into deference. But a Scythian is
touched with no reverential promptings; and, as the Roman

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student well knows, the august Senators themselves, seated
in the Senate-house, on the majestic hill of the Capitol, had
their holy beards tweaked by the insolent chief of the Goths.

Such an array of beards! spade-shaped, hammer-shaped,
dagger-shaped, triangular, square, peaked, round, hemispherical,
and forked. But chief among them all, was old Ushant's,
the ancient Captain of the Forecastle. Of a Gothic venerableness,
it fell upon his breast like a continual iron-gray storm.

Ah! old Ushant, Nestor of the crew! it promoted my longevity
to behold you.

He was a man-of-war's-man of the old Benbow school. He
wore a short cue, which the wags of the mizzen-top called
his “plug of pig-tail.” About his waist was a broad boarder's
belt, which he wore, he said, to brace his main-mast,
meaning his backbone; for at times he complained of rheumatic
twinges in the spine, consequent upon sleeping on deck,
now and then, during the night-watches of upward of half a
century. His sheath-knife was an antique—a sort of old-fashioned
pruning-hook; its handle—a sperm whale's tooth—
was carved all over with ships, cannon, and anchors. It was
attached to his neck by a lanyard, elaborately worked into
“rose-knots” and “Turks' heads” by his own venerable fingers.

Of all the crew, this Ushant was most beloved by my glorious
Captain, Jack Chase, who one day pointed him out to
me as the old man was slowly coming down the rigging from
the fore-top.

“There, White-Jacket! isn't that old Chaucer's shipman?

From the Canterbury Tales, White-Jacket! and must not
old Ushant have been living in Chaucer's time, that Chaucer
could draw his portrait so well?”

p277-429

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