University of Virginia Library

22. CHAPTER XXII.

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

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

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 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

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 gingerbread-work
a hearty coat of black paint, which looks more warlike,
is a better preservative, and exempts the sailors from a perpetual
annoyance.