52. CHAPTER LII.
SOMETHING CONCERNING MIDSHIPMEN.
It was the next morning after matchless Jack's interview
with the Commodore and Captain, that a little incident occurred,
soon forgotten by the crew at large, but long remembered
by the few seamen who were in the habit of closely
scrutinizing every-day proceedings. Upon the face of it, it
was but a common event — at least in a man-of-war—the
flogging of a man at the gangway. But the under-current of
circumstances in the case were of a nature that magnified
this particular flogging into a matter of no small importance.
The story itself can not here be related; it would not well
bear recital: enough that the person flogged was a middle-aged
man of the Waist—a forlorn, broken-down, miserable
object, truly; one of those wretched landsmen sometimes driven
into the Navy by their unfitness for all things else, even
as others are driven into the work-house. He was flogged at
the complaint of a midshipman; and hereby hangs the drift
of the thing. For though this waister was so ignoble a mortal,
yet his being scourged on this one occasion indirectly proceeded
from the mere wanton spite and unscrupulousness of
the midshipman in question—a youth, who was apt to indulge
at times in undignified familiarities with some of the men,
who, sooner or later, almost always suffered from his capricious
preferences.
But the leading principle that was involved in this affair is
far too mischievous to be lightly dismissed.
In most cases, it would seem to be a cardinal principle with
a Navy Captain that his subordinates are disintegrated parts
of himself, detached from the main body on special service,
and that the order of the minutest midshipman must be as
deferentially obeyed by the seamen as if proceeding from the
Commodore on the poop. This principle was once emphasized
in a remarkable manner by the valiant and handsome
Sir Peter Parker, upon whose death, on a national arson expedition
on the shores of Chesapeake Bay, in 1812 or 1813,
Lord Byron wrote his well-known stanzas. “By the god of
war!” said Sir Peter to his sailors, “I'll make you touch your
hat to a midshipman's coat, if it's only hung on a broomstick
to dry!”
That the king, in the eye of the law, can do no wrong,
is the well-known fiction of despotic states; but it has remained
for the navies of Constitutional Monarchies and Republics
to magnify this fiction, by indirectly extending it to all
the quarter-deck subordinates of an armed ship's chief magistrate.
And though judicially unrecognized, and unacknowledged
by the officers themselves, yet this is the principle that
pervades the fleet; this is the principle that is every hour
acted upon, and to sustain which, thousands of seamen have
been flogged at the gangway.
However childish, ignorant, stupid, or idiotic a midshipman,
if he but orders a sailor to perform even the most absurd
action, that man is not only bound to render instant and un-answering
obedience, but he would refuse at his peril. And
if, having obeyed, he should then complain to the Captain,
and the Captain, in his own mind, should be thoroughly convinced
of the impropriety, perhaps of the illegality of the order,
yet, in nine cases out of ten, he would not publicly reprimand
the midshipman, nor by the slightest token admit before
the complainant that, in this particular thing, the mid-shipman
had done otherwise than perfectly right.
Upon a midshipman's complaining of a seaman to Lord
Collingwood, when Captain of a line-of-battle ship, he ordered
the man for punishment; and, in the interval, calling the
midshipman aside, said to him, “In all probability, now, the
fault is yours—you know; therefore, when the man is brought
to the mast, you had better ask for his pardon.”
Accordingly, upon the lad's public intercession, Collingwood,
turning to the culprit, said, “This young gentleman
has pleaded so humanely for you, that, in the hope you feel a
due gratitude to him for his benevolence, I will, for this time,
overlook your offence.” This story is related by the editor of
the Admiral's “Correspondence,” to show the Admiral's kind-heartedness.
Now Collingwood was, in reality, one of the most just, humane,
and benevolent admirals that ever hoisted a flag. For
a sea-officer, Collingwood was a man in a million. But if a
man like him, swayed by old usages, could thus violate the
commonest principle of justice—with however good motives
at bottom—what must be expected from other Captains not
so eminently gifted with noble traits as Collingwood?
And if the corps of American midshipmen is mostly replenished
from the nursery, the counter, and the lap of unrestrained
indulgence at home; and if most of them at least, by their
impotency as officers, in all important functions at sea, by
their boyish and overweening conceit of their gold lace, by
their overbearing manner toward the seamen, and by their
peculiar aptitude to construe the merest trivialities of manner
into set affronts against their dignity; if by all this they
sometimes contract the ill-will of the seamen; and if, in a
thousand ways, the seamen can not but betray it—how easy
for any of these midshipmen, who may happen to be unrestrained
by moral principle, to resort to spiteful practices in
procuring vengeance upon the offenders, in many instances to
the extremity of the lash; since, as we have seen, the tacit
principle in the Navy seems to be that, in his ordinary intercourse
with the sailors, a midshipman can do nothing obnoxious
to the public censure of his superiors.
“You fellow, I'll get you licked before long,” is often heard
from a midshipman to a sailor who, in some way not open to
the judicial action of the Captain, has chanced to offend him.
At times you will see one of these lads, not five feet high,
gazing up with inflamed eye at some venerable six-footer of
a forecastle-man, cursing and insulting him by every epithet
deemed most scandalous and unendurable among men. Yet
that man's indignant tongue is treble-knotted by the law, that
suspends death itself over his head should his passion discharge
the slightest blow at the boy-worm that spits at his feet.
But since what human nature is, and what it must forever
continue to be, is well enough understood for most practical
purposes, it needs no special example to prove that, where the
merest boys, indiscriminately snatched from the human family,
are given such authority over mature men, the results
must be proportionable in monstrousness to the custom that
authorizes this worse than cruel absurdity.
Nor is it unworthy of remark that, while the noblest-minded
and most heroic sea-officers—men of the topmost stature,
including Lord Nelson himself—have regarded flogging in the
Navy with the deepest concern, and not without weighty scruples
touching its general necessity, still, one who has seen
much of midshipmen can truly say that he has seen but few
midshipmen who were not enthusiastic advocates and admirers
of scourging. It would almost seem that they themselves,
having so recently escaped the posterior discipline of the nursery
and the infant school, are impatient to recover from those
smarting reminiscences by mincing the backs of full-grown
American freemen.
It should not be omitted here, that the midshipmen in the
English Navy are not permitted to be quite so imperious as
in the American ships. They are divided into three (I think)
probationary classes of “volunteers,” instead of being at once
advanced to a warrant. Nor will you fail to remark, when
you see an English cutter officered by one of these volunteers,
that the boy does not so strut and slap his dirk-hilt with a
Bobadil air, and anticipatingly feel of the place where his
warlike whiskers are going to be, and sputter out oaths so at
the men, as is too often the case with the little boys wearing
best-bower anchors on their lapels in the American Navy.
Yet it must be confessed that at times you see midshipmen
who are noble little fellows, and not at all disliked by the
crew. Besides three gallant youths, one black-eyed little lad
in particular, in the Neversink, was such a one. From his
diminutiveness, he went by the name of
Boat Plug among
the seamen. Without being exactly familiar with them, he
had yet become a general favorite, by reason of his kindness
of manner, and never cursing them. It was amusing to hear
some of the older Tritons invoke blessings upon the youngster,
when his kind tones fell on their weather-beaten ears. “Ah,
good luck to you, sir!” touching their hats to the little man;
“you have a soul to be saved, sir!” There was a wonderful
deal of meaning involved in the latter sentence.
You have a
soul to be saved, is the phrase which a man-of-war's-man peculiarly
applies to a humane and kind-hearted officer. It
also implies that the majority of quarter-deck officers are regarded
by them in such a light that they deny to them the
possession of souls. Ah! but these plebeians sometimes have
a sublime vengeance upon patricians. Imagine an outcast
old sailor seriously cherishing the purely speculative conceit
that some bully in epaulets, who orders him to and fro like a
slave, is of an organization immeasurably inferior to himself;
must at last perish with the brutes, while he goes to his immortality
in heaven.
But from what has been said in this chapter, it must not
be inferred that a midshipman leads a lord's life in a man-of-war.
Far from it. He lords it over those below him, while
lorded over himself by his superiors. It is as if with one hand
a school-boy snapped his fingers at a dog, and at the same time
received upon the other the discipline of the usher's ferule.
And though, by the American Articles of War, a Navy Captain
can not, of his own authority, legally punish a midshipman,
otherwise than by suspension from duty (the same as
with respect to the Ward-room officers), yet this is one of
those sea-statutes which the Captain, to a certain extent, observes
or disregards at his pleasure. Many instances might
be related of the petty mortifications and official insults inflicted
by some Captains upon their midshipmen; far more
severe, in one sense, than the old-fashioned punishment of
sending them to the mast-head, though not so arbitrary as
sending them before the mast, to do duty with the common
sailors—a custom, in former times, pursued by Captains in
the English Navy.
Captain Claret himself had no special fondness for midshipmen.
A tall, overgrown young midshipman, about sixteen
years old, having fallen under his displeasure, he interrupted
the humble apologies he was making, by saying, “Not
a word, sir! I'll not hear a word! Mount the netting, sir,
and stand there till you are ordered to come down!”
The midshipman obeyed; and, in full sight of the entire
ship's company, Captain Claret promenaded to and fro below
his lofty perch, reading him a most aggravating lecture upon
his alleged misconduct. To a lad of sensibility, such treatment
must have been almost as stinging as the lash itself
would have been.
In another case a midshipman attempted to carry the day
by speaking up to his superior; but in a most unexpected
manner he paid the penalty of his indiscretion.
Seeing a reefer's hammock in the quarter-netting, and observing
it to be rather equivocally discolored, the Captain demanded
to know what particular midshipman was the proprietor
of that hammock. When the lad appeared, he said
to him, “What do you call that, sir?” pointing at the discoloration.
“Captain Claret,” said the unabashed reefer, looking him
full in the eye, “you know what that is, sir, as well as I do.”
“So I do, sir. Quarter-master! pitch that hammock over-board.”
The midshipman started, and, hurrying up to it, turned
round, and said, “Captain Claret, I have a purse lashed up
here; it's the only safe way I can keep it.”
“Did you hear me, quarter-master?” said the Captain; and
overboard went the hammock and purse.
The same afternoon, this midshipman reported his cot-boy
as having neglected to scrub this identical hammock, though
repeatedly ordered to do so by his master. Though called a
cot-boy, the person thus designated happened to be, in fact, a
full-grown man. The case being fully laid before the Captain
at the mast, and the midshipman's charge having been heard,
this cot-boy, spite of his protestations, and altogether through
the midshipman's instrumentality, was condemned to a flogging.
Thus it will be seen, that though the Captain permits himself
to domineer over a midshipman, and, in cases of personal
contact with him, does not scruple to pronounce him an egregious
wrong-doer, and treats him accordingly; yet, in other
cases, involving the immediate relationship between the midshipman
and the sailor, he still sustains the principle that a
midshipman can neither say nor do any wrong.
It is to be remembered that, wherever these chapters treat of
midshipmen, the officers known as passed-midshipmen are not
at all referred to. In the American Navy, these officers form
a class of young men, who, having seen sufficient service at sea
as midshipmen to pass an examination before a Board of Commodores,
are promoted to the rank of passed-midshipmen, introductory
to that of lieutenant. They are supposed to be
qualified to do duty as lieutenants, and in some cases temporarily
serve as such. The difference between a passed-midshipman
and a midshipman may be also inferred from their
respective rates of pay. The former, upon sea-service, receives
$750 a year; the latter, $400. There were no passed-midshipmen
in the Neversink.
