62. CHAPTER LXII.
AFTER a three months' absence, I found myself in San
Francisco again, without a cent. When my credit was about
exhausted, (for I had become too mean and lazy, now, to work on a
morning paper, and there were no vacancies on the evening
journals,) I was created San Francisco correspondent of
the Enterprise, and at
the end of five months I was out of debt, but my interest in
my work was gone; for my correspondence being a daily one,
without rest or respite, I got unspeakably tired of it. I wanted
another change. The vagabond instinct was strong upon me.
Fortune favored and I got a new berth and a delightful one. It was
to go down to the Sandwich Islands and write some letters for the
Sacramento Union, an
excellent journal and liberal with employés.
We sailed in the propeller Ajax, in
the middle of winter. The almanac called it winter, distinctly
enough, but the weather was a compromise between spring and
summer. Six days out of port, it became summer altogether. We
had some thirty passengers; among them a cheerful soul by the
name of Williams, and three sea-worn old whaleship captains
going down to join their vessels. These latter played euchre in the
smoking room day and night, drank astonishing quantities of raw
whisky without being in the least affected by it, and were the
happiest people I think I ever saw. And then there was "the old
Admiral—" a retired whaleman. He was a roaring, terrific
combination of wind and lightning and thunder, and earnest,
whole-souled profanity. But nevertheless he was
tenderhearted as a girl. He was a raving, deafening, devastating
typhoon, laying waste the cowering seas but with an unvexed
refuge in the centre where all comers were safe and at rest.
Nobody could know the "Admiral" without liking him; and in a
sudden and dire emergency I think no friend of his would know
which to choose—to be cursed by him or prayed for by a less
efficient person.
His Title of "Admiral" was more strictly "official" than any
ever worn by a naval officer before or since, perhaps—for it was
the voluntary offering of a whole nation, and came direct from the
people themselves
without any intermediate red tape—the people of the
Sandwich Islands. It was a title that came to him freighted with
affection, and honor, and appreciation of his unpretending merit.
And in testimony of the genuineness of the title it was publicly
ordained that an exclusive flag should be devised for him and used
solely to welcome his coming and wave him God-speed in his
going. From that time forth, whenever his ship was signaled in the
offing, or he catted his anchor and stood out to sea, that ensign
streamed from the royal halliards on the parliament house and the
nation lifted their hats to it with spontaneous accord.
Yet he had never fired a gun or fought a battle in his life.
When I knew him on board the
Ajax,
he was seventy-two years old and had plowed the salt water
sixty-one of them. For sixteen years he had gone in and out of the
harbor of Honolulu in command of a whaleship, and for sixteen
more had been captain of a San Francisco and Sandwich Island
passenger packet and had never had an accident or lost a vessel.
The simple natives knew him for a friend who never failed them,
and regarded him as children regard a father. It was a dangerous
thing to oppress them when the roaring Admiral was around.
Two years before I knew the Admiral, he had retired from the
sea on a competence, and had sworn a colossal nine-jointed oath
that he would "never go within
smelling distance of the
salt water again as long as he lived." And he had
conscientiously kept it. That is to say,
he considered he had
kept it, and it would have been more than
dangerous to suggest to him, even in the gentlest way, that making
eleven long sea voyages, as a passenger, during the two years that
had transpired since he "retired," was only keeping the general
spirit of it and not the strict letter.
The Admiral knew only one narrow line of conduct to pursue
in any and all cases where there was a fight, and that was to
shoulder his way straight in without an inquiry as to the rights or
the merits of it, and take the part of the weaker side.—And this was
the reason why he was always sure to be present at the trial of any
universally execrated criminal to oppress and intimidate the jury
with a vindictive pantomime of what he would do to them if he
ever caught them out of the box. And this was why harried cats
and outlawed dogs that knew him confidently took sanctuary under
his chair in time of trouble. In the beginning he was the most
frantic and bloodthirsty Union man that drew breath in the shadow
of the Flag; but the instant the Southerners began to go down
before the sweep of the Northern armies, he ran up the
Confederate colors and from that time till the end was a rampant
and inexorable secessionist.
He hated intemperance with a more uncompromising
animosity than any individual I have ever met, of either sex; and
he was never tired of storming against it and beseeching friends
and strangers alike to be wary and drink with moderation. And yet
if any creature had been guileless enough to intimate that his
absorbing nine gallons of "straight" whiskey during our voyage
was any fraction short of rigid or inflexible abstemiousness, in that
self-same moment the old man would have spun him to the
uttermost parts of the earth in the whirlwind of his wrath. Mind, I
am not saying his whisky ever affected his head or his legs, for it
did not, in even the slightest degree. He was a capacious
container, but he did not hold enough for that. He took a level
tumblerful of whisky every morning before he put his clothes
on—"to sweeten his bilgewater," he said.—He took another after he
got the most of his clothes on, "to settle his mind and give him his
bearings." He then shaved, and put on a clean shirt; after which he
recited the Lord's Prayer in a fervent, thundering bass that shook
the ship to her kelson and suspended all conversation in the main
cabin. Then, at this stage, being invariably "by the head," or "by
the stern," or "listed to port or starboard," he took one more to "put
him on an even keel so that he would mind his hellum and not
miss stays and go about, every time he came up in the wind."—And
now, his state-room door swung open and the sun of his benignant
face beamed redly out upon men and women and children, and he
roared his "Shipmets a'hoy!" in a way that was calculated to wake
the dead and precipitate the final resurrection; and forth he strode,
a picture to look at and a presence to enforce attention. Stalwart
and portly; not a gray hair; broadbrimmed slouch hat; semi-sailor
toggery of blue navy flannel—roomy and ample; a stately expanse
of shirt-front and a liberal amount of black silk neck-cloth tied
with a sailor knot; large chain and imposing seals impending from
his fob; awe-inspiring feet, and "a hand like the hand of
Providence," as his whaling brethren expressed it; wrist-bands and
sleeves pushed back half way to the elbow, out of respect for the
warm weather, and exposing hairy arms, gaudy with red and blue
anchors, ships, and goddesses of liberty tattooed in India ink.
But these details were only secondary matters—his face was the
lodestone that chained the eye. It was a sultry disk, glowing
determinedly out through a weather beaten mask of mahogany, and
studded with warts, seamed with scars, "blazed" all over with
unfailing fresh slips of the razor; and with cheery eyes, under
shaggy brows, contemplating the world from over the back of a
gnarled crag of a nose that loomed vast and lonely out of the
undulating immensity that spread away from its foundations. At
his heels frisked the darling of his bachelor estate, his terrier
"Fan," a creature no larger than a squirrel. The main part of his
daily life was occupied in looking after "Fan," in a motherly way,
and doctoring her for a hundred ailments which existed only in his
imagination
The Admiral seldom read newspapers; and when he did he
never believed anything they said. He read nothing, and believed
in nothing, but "The Old Guard," a secession periodical published
in New York. He carried a dozen copies of it with him, always,
and referred to them for all required information. If it was not
there, he supplied it himself, out of a bountiful fancy, inventing
history, names, dates, and every thing else necessary to make his
point good in an argument. Consequently he was a formidable
antagonist in a dispute. Whenever he swung clear of the record
and began to create history, the enemy was helpless and had to
surrender. Indeed, the enemy
could not keep from betraying some little spark of indignation at
his manufactured history—and when it came to indignation, that
was the Admiral's very "best hold." He was always ready for a
political argument, and if nobody started one he would do it
himself. With his third retort his temper would begin to rise, and
within five minutes he would be blowing a gale, and within fifteen
his smoking-room audience would be utterly stormed away and the
old man left solitary and alone, banging the table with his fist,
kicking the chairs, and roaring a hurricane of profanity. It got so,
after a while, that whenever the Admiral approached, with politics
in his eye, the passengers would drop out with quiet accord, afraid
to meet him; and he would camp on a deserted field.
But he found his match at last, and before a full company. At
one time or another, everybody had entered the lists against him
and been routed, except the quiet passenger Williams. He had
never been able to get an expression of opinion out of him on
politics. But now, just as the Admiral drew near the door and the
company were about to slip out, Williams said:
"Admiral, are you certain about
that circumstance concerning the clergymen you mentioned
the other day?"—referring to a piece of the Admiral's manufactured
history.
Every one was amazed at the man's rashness. The idea of
deliberately inviting annihilation was a thing incomprehensible.
The retreat came to a halt; then everybody sat down again
wondering, to await the upshot of it. The Admiral himself was as
surprised as any one. He paused in the door, with his red
handkerchief half raised to his sweating face, and contemplated
the daring reptile in the corner.
"Certain of it?
Am I certain of it?
Do you think I've been lying about it? What do you take me
for? Anybody that don't know that circumstance, don't know
anything; a child ought to know it. Read up your history! Read it
up — — — —, and don't come asking a man if
he's certain about a
bit of ABC stuff that the very southern niggers know all
about."
Here the Admiral's fires began to wax hot, the atmosphere
thickened, the coming earthquake rumbled, he began to thunder
and lighten. Within three minutes his volcano was in full irruption
and he was discharging flames and ashes of indignation, belching
black volumes of foul history aloft, and vomiting red-hot torrents
of profanity from his crater. Meantime Williams sat silent, and
apparently deeply and earnestly interested in what the old man was
saying. By and by, when the lull came, he said in the most
deferential way, and with the gratified air of a man who has had a
mystery cleared up which had been puzzling him
uncomfortably:
"Now I understand it.
I always thought I knew that piece of history well
enough, but was still afraid to trust it, because there was not that
convincing particularity about it that one likes to have in history;
but when you mentioned every name, the other day, and every
date, and every little circumstance, in their just order and
sequence, I said to myself, this sounds
something like— this
is history—this is putting it
in a shape that gives a man confidence; and I said to
myself afterward, I will just ask the Admiral if he is perfectly
certain about the details, and and if he is I will come out and thank
him for clearing this matter up for me. And that is what I want to
do now—for until you set that matter right it was nothing but just a
confusion in my mind, without head or tail to it."
Nobody ever saw the Admiral look so mollified before, and so
pleased. Nobody had ever received his bogus history as gospel
before; its genuineness had always been called in question either by
words or looks; but here was a man that not only swallowed it all
down, but was grateful for the dose. He was taken a back; he
hardly knew what to say; even his profanity
failed him. Now, Williams continued, modestly and
earnestly:
"But Admiral, in saying that this was the first stone thrown,
and that this precipitated the war, you have overlooked a
circumstance which you are perfectly familiar with, but which has
escaped your memory. Now I grant you that what you have stated
is correct in every detail—to wit: that on the 16th of October, 1860,
two Massachusetts clergymen, named Waite and Granger, went in
disguise to the house of John Moody, in Rockport, at dead of
night, and dragged forth two southern women and their two little
children, and after tarring and feathering them conveyed them to
Boston and burned them alive in the State House square; and I also
grant your proposition that this deed is what led to the secession of
South Carolina on the 20th of December following. Very well."
[Here the company were pleasantly surprised to hear Williams
proceed to come back at the Admiral with his own invincible
weapon—clean, pure, manufactured history, without
a word of truth in it.] "Very well, I say. But Admiral,
why overlook the Willis and Morgan case in South Carolina? You
are too well informed a man not to know all about that
circumstance. Your arguments and your conversations have
shown you to be intimately conversant with every detail of this
national quarrel. You develop matters of history every day that
show plainly that you are no smatterer in it, content to nibble about
the surface, but a man who has searched the depths and possessed
yourself of everything that has a bearing upon the great question.
Therefore, let me just recall to your mind that Willis and Morgan
case—though I see by your face that the whole thing is already
passing through your memory at this moment. On the 12th of
August, 1860, two months before
the Waite and Granger affair, two South Carolina
clergymen, named John H. Morgan and Winthrop L. Willis, one a
Methodist and the other an Old School Baptist, disguised
themselves, and went at midnight to the house of a planter named
Thompson—Archibald F. Thompson, Vice President under Thomas
Jefferson,—and took thence, at midnight, his widowed aunt, (a
Northern woman,) and her adopted child, an orphan-named
Mortimer Highie, afflicted with epilepsy and suffering at the time
from white swelling on one of his legs, and compelled to walk on
crutches in consequence; and the two ministers, in spite of the
pleadings of the victims, dragged them to the bush, tarred and
feathered them, and afterward burned them at the stake in the city
of Charleston. You remember perfectly well what a stir it made;
you remember perfectly well that even the
Charleston
Courier stigmatized
the act as being unpleasant, of questionable propriety,
and scarcely justifiable, and likewise that it would not be matter of
surprise if retaliation ensued. And you remember also, that this
thing was the
cause of the
Massachusetts outrage. Who, indeed, were the two
Massachusetts ministers? and who were the two Southern women
they burned? I do not need to remind
you,
Admiral, with your intimate knowledge of history, that Waite was
the nephew of the woman burned in Charleston; that Granger was
her cousin in the second degree, and that the woman they burned
in Boston was the wife of John H. Morgan, and the still loved but
divorced wife of Winthrop L. Willis. Now, Admiral, it is only fair
that you should acknowledge that the first provocation came from
the Southern preachers and that the Northern ones were justified in
retaliating. In your arguments you never yet have shown the least
disposition to withhold a just verdict or be in anywise unfair, when
authoritative history condemned your position, and therefore I
have no hesitation in asking you to take the original blame from
the Massachusetts ministers, in this matter, and transfer it to the
South Carolina clergymen where it justly belongs."
The Admiral was conquered. This sweet spoken creature who
swallowed his fraudulent history as if it were the bread of life;
basked in his furious blasphemy as if it were generous sunshine;
found only calm, even-handed justice in his rampart partisanship;
and flooded him with invented history so sugarcoated with flattery
and deference that there was no rejecting it, was "too many" for
him. He stammered some awkward, profane sentences about the —
— — — Willis and
Morgan business having escaped his memory, but that he
"remembered it now," and then, under pretence of giving Fan some
medicine for an imaginary cough, drew out of the battle and went
away, a vanquished man. Then cheers and laughter went up, and
Williams, the ship's benefactor was a hero. The news went about
the vessel, champagne was ordered, and enthusiastic reception
instituted in the smoking room, and everybody flocked thither to
shake hands with the conqueror. The wheelman said afterward,
that the Admiral stood up behind the pilot house and "ripped and
cursed all to himself" till he loosened the smokestack guys and
becalmed the mainsail.
The Admiral's power was broken. After that, if he began
argument, somebody would bring Williams, and the old man
would grow weak and begin to quiet down at once. And as soon as
he was done, Williams in his dulcet, insinuating way, would invent
some history (referring for proof, to the old man's own excellent
memory and to copies of "The Old Guard" known not to be in his
possession) that would turn the tables completely and leave the
Admiral all abroad and helpless. By and by he came to so dread
Williams and his gilded tongue that he would stop talking when he
saw him approach, and finally ceased to mention politics
altogether, and from that time forward there was entire peace and
serenity in the ship.