University of Virginia Library

44. CHAPTER XLIV.

The last smuggling story now about to be related also occurred
while we lay in Rio. It is the more particularly presented,
since it furnishes the most curious evidence of the almost
incredible corruption pervading nearly all ranks in some
men-of-war.

For some days, the number of intoxicated sailors collared
and brought up to the mast by the master-at-arms, to be reported
to the deck-officers—previous to a flogging at the gang-way—had,
in the last degree, excited the surprise and vexation
of the Captain and senior officers. So strict were the
Captain's regulations concerning the suppression of grog-smuggling,
and so particular had he been in charging the matter
upon all the Lieutenants, and every under-strapper official in
the frigate, that he was wholly at a loss how so large a quantity
of spirits could have been spirited into the ship, in the
face of all these checks, guards, and precautions.

Still additional steps were adopted to detect the smugglers;
and Bland, the master-at-arms, together with his corporals,
were publicly harangued at the mast by the Captain in person,
and charged to exert their best powers in suppressing the
traffic. Crowds were present at the time, and saw the master-at-arms
touch his cap in obsequious homage, as he solemnly
assured the Captain that he would still continue to do
his best; as, indeed, he said, he had always done. He concluded
with a pious ejaculation, expressive of his personal abhorrence
of smuggling and drunkenness, and his fixed resolution,
so help him Heaven, to spend his last wink in setting up
by night, to spy out all deeds of darkness.

“I do not doubt you, master-at-arms,” returned the Captain;
“now go to your duty.” This master-at-arms was a
favorite of the Captain's.

The next morning, before breakfast, when the market-boat
came off (that is, one of the ship's boats regularly deputed to
bring off the daily fresh provisions for the officers)—when this
boat came off, the master-at-arms, as usual, after carefully examining
both her and her crew, reported them to the deck-officer
to be free from suspicion. The provisions were then
hoisted out, and among them came a good-sized wooden box,
addressed to “Mr.—, Purser of the United States ship
Neversink.” Of course, any private matter of this sort, destined
for a gentleman of the ward-room, was sacred from examination,
and the master-at-arms commanded one of his corporals
to carry it down into the Purser's state-room. But
recent occurrences had sharpened the vigilance of the deck-officer
to an unwonted degree, and seeing the box going down
the hatchway, he demanded what that was, and whom it was
for.

“All right, sir,” said the master-at-arms, touching his cap;
“stores for the Purser, sir.”

“Let it remain on deck,” said the Lieutenant. “Mr. Montgomery!”
calling a midshipman, “ask the Purser whether
there is any box coming off for him this morning.”

“Ay, ay, sir,” said the middy, touching his cap.

Presently he returned, saying that the Purser was ashore.

“Very good, then; Mr. Montgomery, have that box put
into the `brig,' with strict orders to the sentry not to suffer any
one to touch it.”

“Had I not better take it down into my mess, sir, till the
Purser comes off?” said the master-at-arms, deferentially.

“I have given my orders, sir!” said the Lieutenant, turning
away.

When the Purser came on board, it turned out that he
knew nothing at all about the box. He had never so much
as heard of it in his life. So it was again brought up before

the deck-officer, who immediately summoned the master-at-arms.

“Break open that box!”

“Certainly, sir!” said the master-at-arms; and, wrenching
off the cover, twenty-five brown jugs, like a litter of twenty-five
brown pigs, were found snugly nestled in a bed of straw.

“The smugglers are at work, sir,” said the master-at-arms,
looking up.

“Uncork and taste it,” said the officer.

The master-at-arms did so; and, smacking his lips after a
puzzled fashion, was a little doubtful whether it was American
whisky or Holland gin; but he said he was not used to
liquor.

“Brandy; I know it by the smell,” said the officer; “return
the box to the brig.”

“Ay, ay, sir,” said the master-at-arms, redoubling his activity.

The affair was at once reported to the Captain, who, incensed
at the audacity of the thing, adopted every plan to detect
the guilty parties. Inquiries were made ashore; but by
whom the box had been brought down to the market-boat
there was no finding out. Here the matter rested for a time.

Some days after, one of the boys of the mizzen-top was flogged
for drunkenness, and, while suspended in agony at the
gratings, was made to reveal from whom he had procured his
spirits. The man was called, and turned out to be an old superannuated
marine, one Scriggs, who did the cooking for the marine-sergeants
and masters-at-arms' mess. This marine was
one of the most villainous-looking fellows in the ship, with a
squinting, pick-lock, gray eye, and hang-dog gallows gait. How
such a most unmartial vagabond had insinuated himself into
the honorable marine corps was a perfect mystery. He had
always been noted for his personal uncleanliness, and among
all hands, fore and aft, had the reputation of being a notorious
old miser, who denied himself the few comforts, and many of
the common necessaries of a man-of-war life.

Seeing no escape, Scriggs fell on his knees before the Captain,
and confessed the charge of the boy. Observing the fellow
to be in an agony of fear at the sight of the boatswain's
mates and their lashes, and all the striking parade of public
punishment, the Captain must have thought this a good opportunity
for completely pumping him of all his secrets. This
terrified marine was at length forced to reveal his having
been for some time an accomplice in a complicated system of
underhand villainy, the head of which was no less a personage
than the indefatigable chief of police, the master-at-arms
himself. It appeared that this official had his confidential
agents ashore, who supplied him with spirits, and in various
boxes, packages, and bundles—addressed to the Purser and
others—brought them down to the frigate's boats at the landing.
Ordinarily, the appearance of these things for the Purser
and other ward-room gentlemen occasioned no surprise; for
almost every day some bundle or other is coming off for them,
especially for the Purser; and, as the master-at-arms was always
present on these occasions, it was an easy matter for
him to hurry the smuggled liquor out of sight, and, under pretence
of carrying the box or bundle down to the Purser's
room, hide it away upon his own premises.

The miserly marine, Scriggs, with the pick-lock eye, was
the man who clandestinely sold the spirits to the sailors, thus
completely keeping the master-at-arms in the background.
The liquor sold at the most exorbitant prices; at one time
reaching twelve dollars the bottle in cash, and thirty dollars
a bottle in orders upon the Purser, to be honored upon the
frigate's arrival home. It may seem incredible that such
prices should have been given by the sailors; but when some
man-of-war's-men crave liquor, and it is hard to procure, they
would almost barter ten years of their lifetime for but one solitary
“tot,” if they could.

The sailors who became intoxicated with the liquor thus
smuggled on board by the master-at-arms, were, in almost
numberless instances, officially seized by that functionary and

scourged at the gangway. In a previous place it has been
shown how conspicuous a part the master-at-arms enacts at
this scene.

The ample profits of this iniquitous business were divided
between all the parties concerned in it; Scriggs, the marine,
coming in for one third. His cook's mess-chest being brought
on deck, four canvass bags of silver were found in it, amounting
to a sum something short of as many hundred dollars.

The guilty parties were scourged, double-ironed, and for
several weeks were confined in the “brig,” under a sentry;
all but the master-at-arms, who was merely cashiered and imprisoned
for a time, with bracelets at his wrists. Upon being
liberated, he was turned adrift among the ship's company;
and, by way of disgracing him still more, was thrust into the
waist, the most inglorious division of the ship.

Upon going to dinner one day, I found him soberly seated
at my own mess; and at first I could not but feel some very
serious scruples about dining with him. Nevertheless, he was
a man to study and digest; so, upon a little reflection, I was
not displeased at his presence. It amazed me, however, that
he had wormed himself into the mess, since so many of the
other messes had declined the honor; until at last, I ascertained
that he had induced a mess-mate of ours, a distant relation
of his, to prevail upon the cook to admit him.

Now it would not have answered for hardly any other mess
in the ship to have received this man among them, for it
would have torn a huge rent in their reputation; but our
mess, A. No. 1—the Forty-two-pounder Club—was composed
of so fine a set of fellows; so many captains of tops, and quarter
masters—men of undeniable mark on board ship—of long-established
standing and consideration on the gun-deck; that,
with impunity, we could do so many equivocal things, utterly
inadmissible for messes of inferior pretension. Besides, though
we all abhorred the monster of Sin itself, yet, from our social
superiority, highly rarified education in our lofty top, and large
and liberal sweep of the aggregate of things, we were in a

good degree free from those useless, personal prejudices, and
galling hatreds against conspicuous sinners—not Sin—which
so widely prevail among men of warped understandings and
unchristian and uncharitable hearts. No; the superstitions
and dogmas concerning Sin had not laid their withering maxims
upon our hearts. We perceived how that evil was but
good disguised, and a knave a saint in his way; how that in
other planets, perhaps, what we deem wrong, may there be
deemed right; even as some substances, without undergoing
any mutations in themselves, utterly change their color, according
to the light thrown upon them. We perceived that
the anticipated millennium must have begun upon the morning
the first worlds were created; and that, taken all in all,
our man-of-war world itself was as eligible a round-sterned
craft as any to be found in the Milky Way. And we fancied
that though some of us, of the gun-deck, were at times condemned
to sufferings and slights, and all manner of tribulation
and anguish, yet, no doubt, it was only our misapprehension
of these things that made us take them for woeful pains instead
of the most agreeable pleasures. I have dreamed of a
sphere, says Pinzella, where to break a man on the wheel is
held the most exquisite of delights you can confer upon him;
where for one gentleman in any way to vanquish another,
is accounted an everlasting dishonor; where to tumble one
into a pit after death, and then throw cold clods upon his upturned
face, is a species of contumely, only inflicted upon the
most notorious criminals.

But whatever we mess-mates thought, in whatever circumstances
we found ourselves, we never forgot that our frigate,
bad as it was, was homeward-bound. Such, at least, were our
reveries at times, though sorely jarred, now and then, by
events that took our philosophy aback. For after all, philosophy—that
is, the best wisdom that has ever in any way been
revealed to our man-of-war world—is but a slough and a mire,
with a few tufts of good footing here and there.

But there was one man in the mess who would have naught

to do with our philosophy—a churlish, ill-tempered, unphilo-sophical,
superstitious old bear of a quarter-gunner; a believer
in Tophet, for which he was accordingly preparing himself.
Priming was his name; but methinks I have spoken
of him before.

Besides, this Bland, the master-at-arms, was no vulgar,
dirty knave. In him—to modify Burke's phrase—vice seemed,
but only seemed, to lose half its seeming evil by losing all
its apparent grossness. He was a neat and gentlemanly villain,
and broke his biscuit with a dainty hand. There was
a fine polish about his whole person, and a pliant, insinuating
style in his conversation, that was, socially, quite irresistible.
Save my noble captain, Jack Chase, he proved himself the
most entertaining, I had almost said the most companionable
man in the mess. Nothing but his mouth, that was somewhat
small, Moorish-arched, and wickedly delicate, and his
snaky, black eye, that at times shone like a dark-lantern in a
jeweler-shop at midnight, betokened the accomplished scoundrel
within. But in his conversation there was no trace of
evil; nothing equivocal; he studiously shunned an indelicacy,
never swore, and chiefly abounded in passing puns and witticisms,
varied with humorous contrasts between ship and shore
life, and many agreeable and racy anecdotes, very tastefully
narrated. In short—in a merely psychological point of view,
at least—he was a charming blackleg. Ashore, such a man
might have been an irreproachable mercantile swindler, circulating
in polite society.

But he was still more than this. Indeed, I claim for this
master-at-arms a lofty and honorable niche in the Newgate
Calender of history. His intrepidity, coolness, and wonderful
self-possession in calmly resigning himself to a fate that thrust
him from an office in which he had tyrannized over five hundred
mortals, many of whom hated and loathed him, passed all
belief; his intrepidity, I say, in now fearlessly gliding among
them, like a disarmed sword-fish among ferocious white-sharks;
this, surely, bespoke no ordinary man. While in office, even,

his life had often been secretly attempted by the seamen whom
he had brought to the gangway. Of dark nights they had
dropped shot down the hatchways, destined “to damage his
pepper-box,” as they phrased it; they had made ropes with a
hangman's noose at the end, and tried to lasso him in dark
corners. And now he was adrift among them, under notorious
circumstances of superlative villainy, at last dragged to
light; and yet he blandly smiled, politely offered his cigar-holder
to a perfect stranger, and laughed and chatted to right
and left, as if springy, buoyant, and elastic, with an angelic
conscience, and sure of kind friends wherever he went, both
in this life and the life to come.

While he was lying ironed in the “brig,” gangs of the men
were sometimes overheard whispering about the terrible reception
they would give him when he should be set at large.
Nevertheless, when liberated, they seemed confounded by his
erect and cordial assurance, his gentlemanly sociability and
fearless companionableness. From being an implacable police-man,
vigilant, cruel, and remorseless in his office, however
polished in his phrases, he was now become a disinterested,
sauntering man of leisure, winking at all improprieties, and
ready to laugh and make merry with any one. Still, at first,
the men gave him a wide berth, and returned scowls for his
smiles; but who can forever resist the very Devil himself,
when he comes in the guise of a gentleman, free, fine, and
frank? Though Goëthe's pious Margaret hates the Devil in
his horns and harpooneer's tail, yet she smiles and nods to the
engaging fiend in the persuasive, winning, oily, wholly harmless
Mephistophiles. But, however it was, I, for one, regarded
this master-at-arms with mixed feelings of detestation, pity,
admiration, and something opposed to enmity. I could not
but abominate him when I thought of his conduct; but I pitied
the continual gnawing which, under all his deftly-donned
disguises, I saw lying at the bottom of his soul. I admired
his heroism in sustaining himself so well under such reverses.
And when I thought how arbitrary the Articles of War are

in defining a man-of-war villain; how much undetected guilt
might be sheltered by the aristocratic awning of our quarter-deck;
how many florid pursers, ornaments of the ward-room,
had been legally protected in defrauding the people, I could
not but say to myself, Well, after all, though this man is a
most wicked one indeed, yet is he even more luckless than
depraved.

Besides, a studied observation of Bland convinced me that
he was an organic and irreclaimable scoundrel, who did wicked
deeds as the cattle browse the herbage, because wicked
deeds seemed the legitimate operation of his whole infernal organization.
Phrenologically, he was without a soul. Is it
to be wondered at, that the devils are irreligious? What,
then, thought I, who is to blame in this matter? For one,
I will not take the Day of Judgment upon me by authoritatively
pronouncing upon the essential criminality of any man-of-war's-man;
and Christianity has taught me that, at the
last day, man-of-war's-men will not be judged by the Articles
of War, nor by the United States Statutes at Large, but
by immutable laws, ineffably beyond the comprehension of the
honorable Board of Commodores and Navy Commissioners.

But though I will stand by even a man-of-war thief, and
defend him from being seized up at the gangway, if I can—
remembering that my Savior once hung between two thieves,
promising one life-eternal—yet I would not, after the plain
conviction of a villain, again let him entirely loose to prey
upon honest seamen, fore and aft all three decks. But this
did Captain Claret; and though the thing may not perhaps
be credited, nevertheless, here it shall be recorded.

After the master-at-arms had been adrift among the ship's
company for several weeks, and we were within a few days'
sail of home, he was summoned to the mast, and publicly reinstated
in his office as the ship's chief of police. Perhaps
Captain Claret had read the Memoirs of Vidocq, and believed
in the old saying, set a rogue to catch a rogue. Or, perhaps,
he was a man of very tender feelings, highly susceptible to the

soft emotions of gratitude, and could not bear to leave in disgrace
a person who, out of the generosity of his heart, had,
about a year previous, presented him with a rare snuff-box,
fabricated from a sperm-whale's tooth, with a curious silver
hinge, and cunningly wrought in the shape of a whale; also
a splendid gold-mounted cane, of a costly Brazilian wood, with
a gold plate, bearing the Captain's name and rank in the
service, the place and time of his birth, and with a vacancy
underneath—no doubt providentially left for his heirs to record
his decease.

Certain it was that, some months previous to the master-at-arms'
disgrace, he had presented these articles to the Captain,
with his best love and compliments; and the Captain
had received them, and seldom went ashore without the cane,
and never took snuff but out of that box. With some Captains,
a sense of propriety might have induced them to return
these presents, when the generous donor had proved himself
unworthy of having them retained; but it was not Captain
Claret who would inflict such a cutting wound upon any officer's
sensibilities, though long-established naval customs had
habituated him to scourging the people upon an emergency.

Now had Captain Claret deemed himself constitutionally
bound to decline all presents from his subordinates, the sense
of gratitude would not have operated to the prejudice of justice.
And, as some of the subordinates of a man-of-war captain
are apt to invoke his good wishes and mollify his conscience
by making him friendly gifts, it would perhaps have
been an excellent thing for him to adopt the plan pursued by
the President of the United States, when he received a present
of lions and Arabian chargers from the Sultan of Muscat.
Being forbidden by his sovereign lords and masters, the imperial
people, to accept of any gifts from foreign powers, the
President sent them to an auctioneer, and the proceeds were
deposited in the Treasury. In the same manner, when Captain
Claret received his snuff-box and cane, he might have
accepted them very kindly, and then sold them off to the highest

bidder, perhaps to the donor himself, who in that case
would never have tempted him again.

Upon his return home, Bland was paid off for his full term,
not deducting the period of his suspension. He again entered
the service in his old capacity.

As no further allusion will be made to this affair, it may
as well be stated now that, for the very brief period elapsing
between his restoration and being paid off in port by the Purser,
the master-at-arms conducted himself with infinite discretion,
artfully steering between any relaxation of discipline—
which would have awakened the displeasure of the officers—
and any unwise severity—which would have revived, in tenfold
force, all the old grudges of the seamen under his command.

Never did he show so much talent and tact as when vibrating
in this his most delicate predicament; and plenty of cause
was there for the exercise of his cunningest abilities; for, upon
the discharge of our man-of-war's-men at home, should he
then be held by them as an enemy, as free and independent
citizens they would waylay him in the public streets, and take
purple vengeance for all his iniquities, past, present, and possible
in the future. More than once a master-at-arms ashore
has been seized by night by an exasperated crew, and served
as Origen served himself, or as his enemies served Abelard.

But though, under extreme provocation, the people of a
man-of-war have been guilty of the maddest vengeance, yet,
at other times, they are very placable and milky-hearted, even
to those who may have outrageously abused them; many
things in point might be related, but I forbear.

This account of the master-at-arms can not better be concluded
than by denominating him, in the vivid language of
the Captain of the Fore-top, as “the two ends and middle of
the thrice-laid strand of a bloody rascal,” which was intended
for a terse, well-knit, and all-comprehensive assertion, without
omission or reservation. It was also asserted that, had
Tophet itself been raked with a fine-tooth comb, such another
ineffable villain could not by any possibility have been caught.