75. CHAPTER LXXV.
“SINK, BURN, AND DESTROY.”
Printed Admiralty orders in time of war.
Among innumerable “yarns and twisters” reeled off in our
main-top during our pleasant run to the North, none could
match those of Jack Chase, our captain.
Never was there better company than ever-glorious Jack.
The things which most men only read of, or dream about, he
had seen and experienced. He had been a dashing smuggler
in his day, and could tell of a long nine-pounder rammed home
with wads of French silks; of cartridges stuffed with the finest
gunpowder tea; of cannister-shot full of West India sweet-meats;
of sailor frocks and trowsers, quilted inside with costly
laces; and table legs, hollow as musket barrels, compactly
stowed with rare drugs and spices. He could tell of a wicked
widow, too—a beautiful receiver of smuggled goods upon the
English coast—who smiled so sweetly upon the smugglers
when they sold her silks and laces, cheap as tape and ginghams.
She called them gallant fellows, hearts of game; and
bade them bring her more.
He could tell of desperate fights with his British majesty's
cutters, in midnight coves upon a stormy coast; of the capture
of a reckless band, and their being drafted on board a man-of-war;
of their swearing that their chief was slain; of a writ
of habeas corpus sent on board for one of them for a debt—a
reserved and handsome man—and his going ashore, strongly
suspected of being the slaughtered captain, and this a successful
scheme for his escape.
But more than all, Jack could tell of the battle of Navarino,
for he had been a captain of one of the main-deck guns on
board Admiral Codrington's flag-ship, the Asia. Were mine
the style of stout old Chapman's Homer, even then I would
scarce venture to give noble Jack's own version of this fight,
wherein, on the 20th of October, A.D. 1827, thirty-two sail
of Englishmen, Frenchmen, and Russians, attacked and vanquished
in the Levant an Ottoman fleet of three ships-of-the
line, twenty-five frigates, and a swarm of fire ships and hornet
craft.
“We bayed to be at them,” said Jack; “and when we
did open fire, we were like dolphin among the flying-fish.
`Every man take his bird' was the cry, when we trained our
guns. And those guns all smoked like rows of Dutch pipe-bowls,
my hearties! My gun's crew carried small flags in
their bosoms, to nail to the mast in case the ship's colors were
shot away. Stripped to the waistbands, we fought like skinned
tigers, and bowled down the Turkish frigates like nine-pins.
Among their shrouds—swarming thick with small-arm men,
like flights of pigeons lighted on pine-trees—our marines sent
their leaden pease and gooseberries, like a shower of hail-stones
in Labrador. It was a stormy time, my hearties! The
blasted Turks pitched into the old Asia's hull a whole quarry
of marble shot, each ball one hundred and fifty pounds. They
knocked three port-holes into one. But we gave them better
than they sent. `Up and at them, my bull-dog!' said I,
patting my gun on the breech; `tear open hatchways in their
Moslem sides!' White-Jacket, my lad, you ought to have
been there. The bay was covered with masts and yards, as
I have seen a raft of snags in the Arkansas River. Showers
of burned rice and olives from the exploding foe fell upon us
like manna in the wilderness. `Allah! Allah! Mohammed!
Mohammed!' split the air; some cried it out from the Turkish
port-holes; other shrieked it forth from the drowning waters,
their top-knots floating on their shaven skulls, like black-snakes
on half-tide rocks. By those top-knots they believed
that their Prophet would drag them up to Paradise, but they
sank fifty fathoms, my hearties, to the bottom of the bay.
`Ain't the bloody 'Hometons going to strike yet?' cried my
first loader, a Guernsey man, thrusting his neck out of the
port-hole, and looking at the Turkish line-of-battle ship near
by. That instant his head blew by me like a bursting Paixhan
shot, and the flag of Ned Knowles himself was hauled
down forever. We dragged his hull to one side, and avenged
him with the cooper's anvil, which, endways, we rammed
home; a mess-mate shoved in the dead man's bloody Scotch
cap for the wad, and sent it flying into the line-of-battle ship.
By the god of war! boys, we hardly left enough of that craft
to boil a pot of water with. It was a hard day's work—a
sad day's work, my hearties. That night, when all was over,
I slept sound enough, with a box of cannister shot for my
pillow! But you ought to have seen the boat-load of Turkish
flags one of our captains carried home; he swore to dress
his father's orchard in colors with them, just as our spars are
dressed for a gala day.”
“Though you tormented the Turks at Navarino, noble
Jack, yet you came off yourself with only the loss of a splinter,
it seems,” said a top-man, glancing at our captain's maimed
hand.
“Yes; but I and one of the Lieutenants had a narrower
escape than that. A shot struck the side of my port-hole,
and sent the splinters right and left. One took off my hat
rim clean to my brow; another razeed the Lieutenant's left
boot, by slicing off the heel; a third shot killed my powder-monkey
without touching him.”
“How, Jack?”
“It whizzed the poor babe dead. He was seated on a
cheese of wads at the time, and after the dust of the powdered
bulwarks had blown away, I noticed he yet sat still, his eyes
wide open. `My little hero!' cried I, and I clapped him on
the back; but he fell on his face at my feet. I touched his
heart, and found he was dead. There was not a little finger
mark on him.”
Silence now fell upon the listeners for a time, broken at
last by the Second Captain of the Top.
“Noble Jack, I know you never brag, but tell us what you
did yourself that day?”
“Why, my hearties, I did not do quite as much as my
gun. But I flatter myself it was that gun that brought
down the Turkish Admiral's main-mast; and the stump left
wasn't long enough to make a wooden leg for Lord Nelson.”
“How? but I thought, by the way you pull a lock-string
on board here, and look along the sight, that you can steer a
shot about right—hey, Jack?”
“It was the Admiral of the Fleet—God Almighty—who
directed the shot that dismasted the Turkish Admiral,” said
Jack; “I only pointed the gun.”
“But how did you feel, Jack, when the musket-ball carried
away one of your hooks there?”
“Feel! only a finger the lighter. I have seven more left,
besides thumbs; and they did good service, too, in the torn
rigging the day after the fight; for you must know, my hearties,
that the hardest work comes after the guns are run in.
Three days I helped work, with one hand, in the rigging, in
the same trowsers that I wore in the action; the blood had
dried and stiffened; they looked like glazed red morocco.”
Now, this Jack Chase had a heart in him like a mastodon's.
I have seen him weep when a man has been flogged
at the gangway; yet, in relating the story of the Battle of
Navarino, he plainly showed that he held the God of the
blessed Bible to have been the British Commodore in the
Levant, on the bloody 20th of October, A.D. 1827. And
thus it would seem that war almost makes blasphemers of
the best of men, and brings them all down to the Feejee
standard of humanity. Some man-of-war's-men have confessed
to me, that as a battle has raged more and more, their
hearts have hardened in infernal harmony; and, like their
own guns, they have fought without a thought.
Soldier or sailor, the fighting man is but a fiend; and the
staff and body-guard of the Devil musters many a baton.
But war at times is inevitable. Must the national honor be
trampled under foot by an insolent foe?
Say on, say on; but know you this, and lay it to heart,
war-voting Bench of Bishops, that He on whom we believe
himself has enjoined us to turn the left cheek if the right be
smitten. Never mind what follows. That passage you can
not expunge from the Bible; that passage is as binding upon
us as any other; that passage embodies the soul and substance
of the Christian faith; without it, Christianity were
like any other faith. And that passage will yet, by the
blessing of God, turn the world. But in some things we
must turn Quakers first.
But though unlike most scenes of carnage, which have
proved useless murders of men, Admiral Codrington's victory
undoubtedly achieved the emancipation of Greece, and terminated
the Turkish atrocities in that tomahawked state, yet
who shall lift his hand and swear that a Divine Providence
led the van of the combined fleets of England, France, and
Russia at the battle of Navarino? For if this be so, then it
led the van against the Church's own elect—the persecuted
Waldenses in Switzerland—and kindled the Smithfield fires
in bloody Mary's time.
But all events are mixed in a fusion indistinguishable.
What we call Fate is even, heartless, and impartial; not a
fiend to kindle bigot flames, nor a philanthropist to espouse
the cause of Greece. We may fret, fume, and fight; but
the thing called Fate everlastingly sustains an armed neutrality.
Yet though all this be so, nevertheless, in our own hearts, we
mold the whole world's hereafters; and in our own hearts we
fashion our own gods. Each mortal casts his vote for whom
he will to rule the worlds; I have a voice that helps to shape
eternity; and my volitions stir the orbits of the furthest suns.
In two senses, we are precisely what we worship. Ourselves
are Fate.
