From Sail to Steam: Recollections of Naval Life — Chapter V, Part 2

Judged by my experience, which I believe was no worse than the average, the life of an aide is literally that of a dog; it was chiefly following round, or else sitting in a boat at a landing, just as a dog waits outside for his master, to all hours of the night, till your superior comes down from his dinner or out from the theatre.

A

coachman has a "cinch," to use our present-day slang; for he has only his own behavior to look to, while the aide has to see that the dozen bargemen also behave, don't skip up the wharf for a drink, and then forget the way back to the boat.

If one or two do, no matter how good his dinner may have been, the remarks of the flag-officer are apt to be unpleasant; not to speak of subsequent interviews with the first-lieutenant.

I trace to those days a horror which has never left me of keeping servants waiting.

Flag-officers apparently never heard that punctuality is the politeness of kings.

There are, however, occasional compensations; bones, I might say, pursuing the dog analogy.

One incident very interesting to me occurred.

The flag-officer had a well-deserved reputation for great bravery, and in his early career had fought two or three duels.

One of these had been at Rio Janeiro, on an island in the harbor, and he had there killed his man.

On this occasion, the barge being manned and I along, we pulled over to the island.

In the thirty intervening years it must have changed greatly, for many buildings were now on it; but his memory evidently was busy and serving him well.

He walked round meditatively, uttering a low, humming whistle, his hands in his pockets, his secretary and myself following.

At last he reached a point where he stopped and mused for some moments, after which he went quietly and silently to the boat.

Not a word passed from him to us during our stay, nor the subsequent pull to shore; but there can be little doubt where his thoughts were.

It is right to add that on the occasion in question not only was the provocation all on the other side, but it was endured by him to the utmost that the standards of 1830 would permit.

To my aideship also I owed an unusual opportunity to see an incident of bygone times--the heaving down of a fair-sized ship of war.

One of our sloops, of some eight hundred tons' burden, bound to China, had put into Rio for repairs: a leak of no special danger, but so near the keel as to demand examination.

It might get worse.

As yet Rio had no dry-dock, and so she must be hove down.

This operation, probably never known in these days, when dry-docks are to be found in all quarters, consisted in heeling the ship over, by heavy purchases attached to the top of the lower masts, until the keel, or at least so much of the side as was necessary, was out of water.

As the leverage on the masts was extreme, almost everything had to be taken out of the ship, guns included, to lighten her to the utmost; and the spars themselves were heavily backed to bear the strain.

The upper works, usually out of water, must on the down side be closed and protected against the proposed immersion.

In short, preparation was minute as well as extensive.

In the old days, when docks were rare, and long voyages would be made in regions without local resources, a ship would be hove down two or three times in a cruise, to clean her uncoppered bottom or to see what damage worms might be effecting.

When frequently done, familiarity doubtless made it comparatively easy; but by 1859 it had become very exceptional.

I have never seen another instance.

She was taken to a sheltered cove, in one of those picturesque bights which abound in the harbor of Rio, the most beautiful bay in the world, and there, in repeated visits by our flag-officer, I saw most stages of the process.

Technical details I will not inflict upon the reader, but there was one amusing anecdote told me by our carpenter, who as a senior in his business was much to the fore.

Some general overhauling was also required, and among other things the sloop's captain pointed out that the side-board in the cabin was not well secured.

"I have sometimes to get up two or three times in the night to see to it," he said.

He had been one of the restored victims of the Retiring Board of 1855, and had the reputation of knowing that sideboards exist for other purposes than merely being secured; hence, at this pathetic remark, the carpenter caught a wink, "on the fly," as it passed from the flag-officer to the captain of the _Congress_ and back again.

The commander invalided soon after, and the sloop went on her way to China under the charge of the first lieutenant.

The flag-officer, though not a man of particular distinction, possessed strongly that kind of individuality which among seamen of the days before steam, when the world was less small and less frequented, was more common than it is now, when we so cluster that, like shot in a barrel, we are rounded and polished by mere attrition.

Formerly, characteristics had more chance to emphasize themselves and throw out angles, as I believe they still do in long polar seclusions.

Withal, there came from him from time to time a whiff of the naval atmosphere of the past, like that from a drawer where lavender has been.

Going ashore once with him for a constitutional, he caught sight of a necktie which my fond mother had given me.

It was black, yes; but with variations.

"Humph!"

he ejaculated; "don't wear a thing like that with me.

You look like a privateersman."

There spoke the rivalries of 1812. There had not been a privateersman in the United States for near a half-century.

A great chum of his was the senior surgeon of the frigate, a man near his own years.

Leaving the ship together for a walk, the surgeon, crossing the deck, smudged his white trousers with paint or coal-tar, the free application of which in unexpected places is one of the snares attending a well-appearing man-of-war.

"Never mind, doctor," said the flag-officer, consolingly, falling back like Sancho Panza on an ancient proverb; "remember the two dirtiest things in the world are a clean ship and a clean soldier"--paint and pipe-clay, to wit.

Another trait was an extensive, though somewhat mild, profanity which took no account of ladies' presence, although he was almost exaggeratedly deferential to them, as well as cordially courteous to all.

His speech was like his gait, tripping.

I remember the arrival of the first steamer of a new French line to Rio.

Steam mail-service was there and then exceptional; most of our home letters still came by sailing-vessel; consequently, this was an event, and brought the inevitable banquet.

He was present; I also, as his aide, seated nearly opposite him, with two or three other of our officers.

He was called to respond to a toast.

"Gentlemen and ladies!"

he began.

"No!

Ladies and gentlemen--ladies always first, d--n me!"

What more he said I do not recall, although we all loyally applauded him.

Many years afterwards, when he was old and feeble, an acquaintance of mine met him, and he began to tell of the tombstone of some person in whom he was interested.

After various particulars, he startled his auditor with the general descriptive coruscation, "It was covered with angels and cherubs, and the h--l knows what else."

It would be easily possible to overdraw the personal peculiarities of the seamen.

I remember nothing corresponding at all to the extravagances instanced in my early reading of Colburn's; such as a frigate's watch--say one hundred and fifty men--on liberty in Portsmouth, England, buying up all the gold-laced cocked bats in the place, and appearing with them at the theatre.

Many, however, who have seen a homeward-bound ship leaving port, the lower rigging of her three masts crowded with seamen from deck to top, returning roundly the cheers given by all the ships-of-war present, foreign as well as national, as she passes, have witnessed also the time-honored ceremony of her crew throwing their hats overboard with the last cheer.

This corresponded to the breaking of glasses after a favorite toast, or to the bursts of enthusiasm in a Spanish bull-ring, where Andalusian caps fly by dozens into the arena.

There, however, the bull-fighter returns them, with many bows; but those of the homeward-bounders become the inheritance of the boatmen of the port.

The midshipman of the watch being stationed on the forecastle, my intimates among the crew were the staid seamen, approaching middle-age; allotted there, where they would have least going aloft.

The two captains of the forecastle--one, I shrewdly think, Dutch, the other English, though both had English names--would engage in conversation with me at times, mingling deference and conscious superior experience in due proportion.

One, I remember, just before the War of Secession began, was greatly exercised about the oncoming troubles.

The causes of the difficulty and the political complications disturbed him little; but the probable prospect of the heads of the rebellion losing their property engrossed his mind.

He constantly returned to this; it would be confiscated, doubtless; yet the assertion was an evident implied query to me, to which I could give no positive answer.

As is known, few of the seamen, as of private soldiers in the army, sympathized sufficiently with the Confederacy to join it.

Indeed, the vaunt I have heard attributed to Southern officers of the old navy, which, though never uttered in my ears, was very consonant to the Southern spirit as I then knew it, that Southern officers with Yankee seamen could beat the world, testified at least to the probable attitude of the latter in a war of sections.

Considering the great naval names of the past, Preble, Hull, Decatur, Bainbridge, Stewart, Porter, Perry, and Macdonough, the two most Southern of whom came from Delaware and Maryland, this ante-bellum assurance was, to say the least, self-confident; but Farragut was a Southerner.

The other captain of the forecastle was less communicative, taciturn by nature; but there ran of him a story of amusing simplicity.

It occurred to him on one occasion that he would lay under contribution the resources of the ship's small library.

Accordingly he went to the chaplain, in whose care it was;

but as he was wholly in the dark as to what particular book he might like, the chaplain, after two or three tries, suggested a _Life of Paul Jones_.

Yes, he thought he would like that.

"You see, I was shipmates with him some cruises ago; he was with me in the main-top of the ----."

Another forecastle intimate of mine was the boatswain, who, like most boatswains of that day, had served his time before the mast.

As is the case with many self-made men, he, on his small scale, was very conscious of the fact, and of general consequent desert.

A favorite saying with him was, "Thanks to my own industry and my wife's economy, I am now well beforehand with the world."

Like a distinguished officer higher in rank of that day, of whom it was said that he remembered nothing later than 1813, my boatswain's memory dwelt much in the thirties, though he acknowledged more recent experiences.

His attitude towards steam, essentially conservative, was strictly and amusingly official.

He had served on board one steamer, the _San Jacinto_; and what had pleased him was that the yards could be squared and rigging hauled taut--his own special function--before entering port, so that in those respects the job had been done when the anchor dropped.

One of his pet stories, frequently brought forward, concerned a schooner in which he had served in the earlier period, and will appeal to those who know how dear a fresh coat of paint is to a seaman's heart.

She had just been thus decorated within and without, and was standing into a West-Indian port to show her fine feathers, when a sudden flaw of wind knocked her off, and over, dangerously close to a rocky point.

The first order given was, "Stand clear of the paint-work!"

--an instance of the ruling passion strong _in extremis_.

He had another woesome account of a sloop-of-war in which he had gone through the Straits of Magellan.

The difficult navigation and balky winds made the passage protracted for a sailing-vessel; all were put on short rations, and the day before she entered a Chilian port the bread-room was swept to the last crumbs.

"I often could not sleep for hunger when I turned in."

In the same ship, the watch-officers falling short, through illness or suspension, the captain set a second lieutenant of marines to take a day watch.

Being, as he supposed, put to do something, he naturally wanted to do it, if he only knew what it was, and how it was to be done.

The master of the ship was named Peter Wager, and to him, when taking sights, the marine appealed.

"Peter, what's the use of being officer of the deck if you don't do anything?

Tell me something to do."

"Well," Peter replied, "you might send all the watch aft and take in the mizzen-royal"--the mizzen-royal being the smallest of all sails, requiring about two ordinary men, and in no wise missed when in.

This was practical "tales for the marines."

This boatswain afterwards saw the last of the _Congress_, when the _Merrimac_--or rather the _Virginia_, to give her her Confederate name--wasted time murdering a ship already dead, aground and on fire.

He often afterwards spun me the yarn; for I liked the old man, and not infrequently went to see him in later days.

He had borne good-humoredly the testiness with which a youngster is at times prone to assert himself against what he fancies interference, and I had appreciated the rebuke.

The _Congress_ disaster was a very big and striking incident in the career of any person, and it both ministered to his self-esteem and provided the evening of his life with material for talk.

Unhappily, I have to confess, as even Boswell at times did, I took no notes, and cannot reproduce that which to me is of absorbing interest, the individual impressions of a vivid catastrophe.

The boatswain was one of the four who in naval phrase were termed "warrant" officers, in distinction from the lieutenants and those above, who held their offices by "commission."

The three others were the gunner, carpenter, and sailmaker, names which sufficiently indicate their several functions.

In the hierarchical classification of the navy, as then established by long tradition, the midshipmen, although on their way to a commission, were warrant officers also; and in consequence, though they had a separate mess, they had the same smoking-place, the effect of which in establishing a community of social intercourse every smoker will recognize.

I suppose, if there had been three sides to a ship, there would have been three smoking-rendezvous; but in the crude barbarism of those days--as it will now probably be considered--both commissioned and warrant officers had no place to smoke except away forward on the gun-deck--the "eyes" of the ship, as the spot was appropriately named; the superiors on the honor side, which on the gun-deck was the port, the midshipmen and warrant officers on the starboard.

The position was not without advantages, when riding head to wind, in hot tropical weather; but under way, close-hauled, with a stiff breeze, a good deal of salt water found its way in, especially if the jackasses were in the hawse-holes.

But under such conditions we sat there serenely, the water coursing in a flowing stream under our chairs if the ship had a steady heel, or rushing madly from side to side if she lurched to windward.

The stupidity of it was that we didn't even know we were uncomfortable, and by all sound philosophy were so far better off than our better accommodated successors.

What was more annoying was the getting forward at night, when the hammocks were in place; but even for that occasional compensations offered.

I remember once, when making this awkward journey, hearing a colloquy between two young seamen just about to swing themselves into bed at nine o'clock.

"I say, Bill," said one, with voluptuous satisfaction, "too watches in,[9] and beans to-morrow."

Can any philosophy soar higher than that, in contentment with small things?

Plain living and high thinking!

Diogenes wasn't in it.

As the warrant officers of the ship were of the generation before us, we heard from their lips many racy and entertaining experiences of the former navy, most of which naturally have escaped me, while others I have dropped all along the line of my preceding reminiscences where they seemed to come in aptly.

Each of the four had very different characteristics, and I fancy they did not agree very well together.

All have long since gone to their rest; peace be with them!

Four is an awkwardly small number for a mess-table of equals; friction is emphasized by narrowness of sphere.

"I didn't like the man," said the boatswain afterwards to me of the sailmaker, narrating the destruction of the _Congress_; "but he is brave, brave as can be.

Getting the wounded over the side to put them ashore, he was as cool as though nothing was happening.

The great guns weren't so bad," he continued--"but the rifle-bullets that came singing along in clouds like mosquitoes!

Yah!"

he used to snap, each time he told me the tale, slapping his ears right and left, as one does at the hum of those intrusive insects.

He did not like the carpenter, either, for reasons of another kind.

They were both humorists, but of a different order.

Indeed, I don't think that the boatswain, though slightly sardonic in expression, suspected himself of humor; but he really came at times pretty close to wit, if that be a perception of incongruities, as I have heard said.

He was telling one day of some mishap that befell a vessel, wherein the officer in charge showed the happy blending of composure and ignorance we sometimes find; a condition concerning which a sufferer once said of himself, "I never open my mouth but I put my foot in it;" a confusion of metaphor, and suggestion of physical contortion, not often so neatly combined in a dozen words.

The boatswain commented: "He didn't mind.

He didn't know what to do, but there he stood, looking all the time as happy as a duck barefooted."

A duck shod, and the consequent expression of its countenance, presents to my mind infinite entertainment.

Our first lieutenant, under whom immediately he worked, was a great trial to him.

He was an elderly man, as first lieutenants of big ships were then, great with the paint-brush and tar-pot, traces of which were continually surprising one's clothes; mighty also in that lavish swashing of sea-water which is called washing decks, and in the tropics is not so bad; but otherwise, while he was one of the kindliest of men, the go was pretty well out of him.

"Yes," the boatswain used to say grimly,--he seldom smiled,--"the first lieutenant is like an old piece of soap--half wore out.

Go day, come day, God send Sunday; that's he."

The carpenter, on the other hand, was always on a broad grin--or rather roar.

He breathed farce, both in story and feature.

Unlike the boatswain, who was middle-sized and very trig, as well as scrupulously neat, the carpenter was over six feet, broad in proportion, with big, round, red, close-shaven face, framed with abundance of white hair.

He looked not unlike one's fancies of the typical English yeoman, while withal having a strong Yankee flavor.

Wearing always a frock-coat, buttoned up as high as any one then buttoned, he carried with it a bluff heartiness of manner, which gave an impression of solidity not, I fear, wholly sustained on demand.

There was no such doubt about the fun, however, or his own huge enjoyment of his own stories, accompanied by a running fire of guffaws, which pointed the appreciation we easily gave.

But it was all of the same character, broad farce; accounts of mishaps such as befall in children's pantomimes,--which their seniors enjoy, too,--practical jokes equally ludicrous, and resulting situations to match.

Comical as such tales were at the time, and many a pleasant pipeful of Lynchburg tobacco in Powhatan clay though they whiled away, they lacked the catching and fixing power of the boatswain's shrewd sayings.

I can remember distinctly only one, of two small midshipmen, shipmates of his in a sloop-of-war of long-gone days, who had a deadly quarrel, calling for blood.

A duel ashore might in those times have been arranged, unknown to superiors--they often were; but the necessity for speedy satisfaction was too urgent, and they could not wait for the end of the voyage.

Consequently, they determined to fight from the two ends of the spritsail-yard, a horizontal spar which crossed the bowsprit end, and gave, or could admit, the required number of paces.

Seconds, I presume, were omitted; they might have attracted unnecessary attention, and on the yard would have been in the way of shot, unless they sat behind their several principals, like damsels on a pillion.

So these two mites, procuring each a loaded pistol, crawled out quietly to their respective places, straddled the yard, and were proceeding to business, when the boatswain caught sight of them from his frequent stand-point between the knightheads.

He ran out, got between them in the line of fire, and from this position of tactical advantage, having collared first one and then the other, brought them both in on the forecastle, where he knocked their heads together.

The last action, I fancy, must be considered an embellishment, necessary to the dramatic completeness of the incident, though it may at least be admitted it would not have been incongruous.

In telling this occurrence, which, punctuated by his own laughter, bore frequent repetition, the carpenter used to give the names of the heroes.

One I have forgotten.

The other I knew in after life and middle-age, still small of stature, with a red face, in outline much like a paroquet's. He was not a bad fellow; but his first lieutenant, a very competent critic, used to say that what he did not know of seamanship would fill a large book.

At first thought it seems somewhat singular that the six lieutenants of the ship presented no such aggregate of idiosyncrasies as did the four warrant officers.

It was not by any means because we did not know them well, and mingle among them with comparative frequency.

Midshipmen, we travelled from one side to the other; here at home, there guests, but to both admitted freely.

But, come to think of it more widely, the distinction I here note must have had a foundation in conditions.

My acquaintance with Marryat, who lived the naval life as no other sea author has, is now somewhat remote, but was once intimate as well as extensive; and recollection deceives me if the same remark does not apply to his characters.

He has a full gallery of captains and lieutenants, each differing from the other; but his greatest successes in portrayal, those that take hold of the memory, are his warrant officers--boatswains, gunners, and carpenters.

The British navy did not give sailmakers this promotion.

By-products though they are, rather than leading characters, Boatswain Chucks, whom Marryat takes off the stage midway, as though too much to sustain to the end, Carpenter Muddle, and Gunner Tallboys, with his aspirations towards navigating, sketched but briefly and in bold outline as they are, survive most of their superiors in clear individuality and amusing eccentricity.

Peter Simple, and even Jack Easy himself, whose traits are more personal than nautical, are less vivid to memory.

Cooper also, who caricatures rather than reproduces life, seeks here his fittest subjects--Boltrope and Trysail--warrant masters, superior in grade indeed to the others, but closely identified with them on board ship, and essentially of the same class.

Such coincidence betokens a more pronounced individuality in the subject-matter.

There have been particular eccentric commissioned officers, of whom quaint stories have descended; but in early days, originality was the class-mark of those of whom I am speaking, as many an anecdote witnesses.

I fancy few will have seen this, which I picked up in my miscellaneous nautical readings.

A boatswain, who had been with Cook in his voyages, chanced upon one of those fervent Methodist meetings common in the eighteenth century.

The preacher, in illustration of the abundance of the Divine mercy, affirmed that there was hope for the worst, even for the boatswain of a man-of-war; whereupon the boatswain sprang to the platform and administered a drubbing.

True or not, offence and punishment testify to public estimate as to character and action; to a natural exaggeration of feature which lends itself readily to reproduction.

This was due, probably, to a more contracted sphere in early life, and afterwards less of that social opportunity, in the course of which angular projections are rounded off and personal peculiarities softened by various contact.

The same cause would naturally occasion more friction and disagreement among themselves.

Thus the several lieutenants of our frigate call for no special characterization.

If egotism, the most amusing of traits where it is not offensive, existed among them to any unusual degree, it was modified and concealed by the acquired exterior of social usage.

Their interests also were wider.

With them, talk was less of self and personal experience, and more upon subjects of general interest, professional or external; the outlook was wider.

But while all this tended to make them more instructive, and in so far more useful companions, it also took from the salt of individuality somewhat of its pungency.

It did not fall to them, either, to become afterwards especially conspicuous in the nearing War of Secession.

They were good seamen and gallant men; knew their duty and did it; but either opportunity failed them, or they failed opportunity; from my knowledge of them, probably the former.

As Nelson once wrote: "A sea officer cannot form plans like those of a land officer; his object is to embrace the happy moment which now and then offers; it may be this day, not for a month, and perhaps never."

So also Farragut is reported to have said of a conspicuous shortcoming: "Every man has one chance;

he has had his and lost it."

Certainly, by failure that man lost promotion with its chances.

It is somewhat congruous to this train of thought that Smith, whom I have so often mentioned, said one day to me: "If I had a son (he was unmarried), I would put him in the navy without hesitation.

I believe there is a day coming shortly when the opportunities for a naval officer will exceed any that our country has yet known."

He did not say what contingencies he had in mind; scarcely those of the War of Secession, large looming though it already was, for, like most of us, he doubtless refused to entertain that sorrowful possibility.

As with many a prophecy, his was of wider scope than he thought; and, though in part fulfilled, more yet remains on the laps of the gods.

He himself, perhaps the ablest of this group, was cut off too early to contribute more than an heroic memory; but that must live in naval annals, enshrined in his father's phrase, along with Craven's "After you, pilot," when the _Tecumseh_ sank.

VI

MY FIRST CRUISE AFTER GRADUATION--NAUTICAL SCENES AND SCENERY--THE APPROACH OF DISUNION