89. CHAPTER LXXXIX.
THE SOCIAL STATE IN A MAN-OF-WAR.
But the floggings at the gangway and the floggings through
the fleet, the stealings, highway robberies, swearings, gamblings,
blasphemings, thimble-riggings, smugglings, and tipplings
of a man-of-war, which throughout this narrative have
been here and there sketched from the life, by no means comprise
the whole catalogue of evil. One single feature is full
of significance.
All large ships of war carry soldiers, called marines. In
the Neversink there were something less than fifty, two thirds
of whom were Irishmen. They were officered by a Lieutenant,
an Orderly Sergeant, two Sergeants, and two Corporals,
with a drummer and fifer. The custom, generally, is to have
a marine to each gun; which rule usually furnishes the scale
for distributing the soldiers in vessels of different force.
Our marines had no other than martial duty to perform;
excepting that, at sea, they stood watches like the sailors, and
now and then lazily assisted in pulling the ropes. But they
never put foot in rigging or hand in tar-bucket.
On the quarter-bills, these men were stationed at none of
the great guns; on the station-bills, they had no posts at the
ropes. What, then, were they for? To serve their country
in time of battle? Let us see. When a ship is running into
action, her marines generally lie flat on their faces behind the
bulwarks (the sailors are sometimes ordered to do the same),
and when the vessel is fairly engaged, they are usually drawn
up in the ship's waist—like a company reviewing in the Park.
At close quarters, their muskets may pick off a seaman or two
in the rigging, but at long-gun distance they must passively
stand in their ranks and be decimated at the enemy's leisure.
Only in one case in ten—that is, when their vessel is attempted
to be boarded by a large party, are these marines of any
essential service as fighting-men; with their bayonets they
are then called upon to “repel!”
If comparatively so useless as soldiers, why have marines
at all in the Navy? Know, then, that what standing armies
are to nations, what turnkeys are to jails, these marines are
to the seamen in all large men-of-war. Their muskets are
their keys. With those muskets they stand guard over the
fresh water; over the grog, when doled; over the provisions,
when being served out by the Master's mate; over the “brig”
or jail; at the Commodore's and Captain's cabin doors; and,
in port, at both gangways and forecastle.
Surely, the crowd of sailors, who besides having so many
sea-officers over them, are thus additionally guarded by soldiers,
even when they quench their thirst—surely these man-of-war's-men
must be desperadoes indeed; or else the naval
service must be so tyrannical that the worst is feared from
their possible insubordination. Either reason holds good, or
both, according to the character of the officers and crew.
It must be evident that the man-of-war's-man casts but an
evil eye on a marine. To call a man a “horse-marine,” is,
among seamen, one of the greatest terms of contempt.
But the mutual contempt, and even hatred, subsisting between
these two bodies of men—both clinging to one keel,
both lodged in one household—is held by most Navy officers
as the height of the perfection of Navy discipline. It is regarded
as the button that caps the uttermost point on their
main-mast.
Thus they reason: Secure of this antagonism between the
marine and the sailor, we can always rely upon it, that if the
sailor mutinies, it needs no great incitement for the marine to
thrust his bayonet through his heart; if the marine revolts,
the pike of the sailor is impatient to charge. Checks and balances,
blood against blood, that is the cry and the argument.
What applies to the relation in which the marine and sailor
stand toward each other—the mutual repulsion implied by a
system of checks—will, in degree, apply to nearly the entire
interior of a man-of-war's discipline. The whole body of this
discipline is emphatically a system of cruel cogs and wheels,
systematically grinding up in one common hopper all that
might minister to the moral well-being of the crew.
It is the same with both officers and men. If a Captain
have a grudge against a Lieutenant, or a Lieutenant against
a midshipman, how easy to torture him by official treatment,
which shall not lay open the superior officer to legal rebuke.
And if a midshipman bears a grudge against a sailor, how
easy for him, by cunning practices, born of a boyish spite, to
have him degraded at the gangway. Through all the endless
ramifications of rank and station, in most men-of-war there
runs a sinister vein of bitterness, not exceeded by the fire-side
hatreds in a family of step-sons ashore. It were sickening to
detail all the paltry irritabilities, jealousies, and cabals, the
spiteful detractions and animosities, that lurk far down, and
cling to the very kelson of the ship. It is unmanning to think
of. The immutable ceremonies and iron etiquette of a man-of-war;
the spiked barriers separating the various grades of
rank; the delegated absolution of authority on all hands; the
impossibility, on the part of the common seaman, of appeal
from incidental abuses, and many more things that might
be enumerated, all tend to beget in most armed ships a general
social condition which is the precise reverse of what any
Christian could desire. And though there are vessels, that in
some measure furnish exceptions to this; and though, in other
ships, the thing may be glazed over by a guarded, punctilious
exterior, almost completely hiding the truth from casual
visitors, while the worst facts touching the common sailor are
systematically kept in the background, yet it is certain that
what has here been said of the domestic interior of a man-of-war
will, in a greater or less degree, apply to most vessels in
the Navy. It is not that the officers are so malevolent, nor,
altogether, that the man-of-war's-man is so vicious. Some of
these evils are unavoidably generated through the operation
of the Naval code; others are absolutely organic to a Navy
establishment, and, like other organic evils, are incurable, except
when they dissolve with the body they live in.
These things are undoubtedly heightened by the close cribbing
and confinement of so many mortals in one oaken box on
the sea. Like pears closely packed, the crowded crew mutually
decay through close contact, and every plague-spot is contagious.
Still more, from this same close confinement—so
far as it affects the common sailors—arise other evils, so direful
that they will hardly bear even so much as an allusion.
What too many seamen are when ashore is very well known;
but what some of them become when completely cut off from
shore indulgences can hardly be imagined by landsmen. The
sins for which the cities of the plain were overthrown still linger
in some of these wooden-walled Gomorrahs of the deep.
More than once complaints were made at the mast in the
Neversink, from which the deck officer would turn away with
loathing, refuse to hear them, and command the complainant
out of his sight. There are evils in men-of-war, which, like
the suppressed domestic drama of Horace Walpole, will neither
bear representing, nor reading, and will hardly bear thinking
of. The landsman who has neither read Walpole's Mysterious
Mother, nor Sophocles's Œdipus Tyrannus, nor the
Roman story of Count Cenci, dramatized by Shelley, let that
landsman guardedly remain in his ignorance of even worse
horrors than these, and forever abstain from seeking to draw
aside this veil.
