CHAPTER LII.
SOMETHING CONCERNING MIDSHIPMEN.
It was the next morning after matchless Jack's interview with theCommodore and Captain, that a little incident occurred, soon forgottenby the crew at large, but long remembered by the few seamen who were inthe habit of closely scrutinising every-day proceedings. Upon the faceof it, it was but a common event--at least in a man-of-war--theflogging of a man at the gangway. But the under-current ofcircumstances in the case were of a nature that magnified thisparticular flogging into a matter of no small importance. The storyitself cannot here be related; it would not well bear recital: enoughthat the person flogged was a middle-aged man of the Waist--a forlorn,broken-down, miserable object, truly; one of those wretched landsmensometimes driven into the Navy by their unfitness for all things else,even as others are driven into the workhouse. He was flogged at thecomplaint of a midshipman; and hereby hangs the drift of the thing. Forthough this waister was so ignoble a mortal, yet his being scourged onthis one occasion indirectly proceeded from the mere wanton spite andunscrupulousness of the midshipman in question--a youth, who was apt toindulge at times in undignified familiarities with some of the men,who, sooner or later, almost always suffered from his capriciouspreferences.
But the leading principle that was involved in this affair is far toomischievous to be lightly dismissed.
In most cases, it would seem to be a cardinal principle with a NavyCaptain that his subordinates are disintegrated parts of himself,detached from the main body on special service, and that the order ofthe minutest midshipman must be as deferentially obeyed by the seamenas if proceeding from the Commodore on the poop. This principle wasonce emphasised in a remarkable manner by the valiant and handsome SirPeter Parker, upon whose death, on a national arson expedition on theshores of Chesapeake Bay, in 1812 or 1813, Lord Byron wrote hiswell-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 hungon a broomstick to dry!"
That the king, in the eye of the law, can do no wrong, is thewell-known fiction of despotic states; but it has remained for thenavies of Constitutional Monarchies and Republics to magnify thisfiction, by indirectly extending it to all the quarter-decksubordinates of an armed ship's chief magistrate. And though judiciallyunrecognised, and unacknowledged by the officers themselves, yet thisis the principle that pervades the fleet; this is the principle that isevery hour acted upon, and to sustain which, thousands of seamen havebeen flogged at the gangway.
However childish, ignorant, stupid, or idiotic a midshipman, if he butorders a sailor to perform even the most absurd action, that man is notonly bound to render instant and unanswering obedience, but he wouldrefuse at his peril. And if, having obeyed, he should then complain tothe Captain, and the Captain, in his own mind, should be thoroughlyconvinced of the impropriety, perhaps of the illegality of the order,yet, in nine cases out of ten, he would not publicly reprimand themidshipman, nor by the slightest token admit before the complainantthat, in this particular thing, the midshipman had done otherwise thanperfectly right.
Upon a midshipman's complaining of a seaman to Lord Collingwood, whenCaptain of a line-of-battle ship, he ordered the man for punishment;and, in the interval, calling the midshipman aside, said to him, "Inall probability, now, the fault is yours--you know; therefore, when theman is brought to the mast, you had better ask for his pardon."
Accordingly, upon the lad's public intercession, Collingwood, turningto the culprit, said, "This young gentleman has pleaded so humanely foryou, that, in hope you feel a due gratitude to him for his benevolence,I will, for this time, overlook your offence." This story is related bythe editor of the Admiral's "Correspondence," to show the Admiral'skindheartedness.
Now Collingood was, in reality, one of the most just, humane, andbenevolent admirals that ever hoisted a flag. For a sea-officer,Collingwood was a man in a million. But if a man like him, swayed byold usages, could thus violate the commonest principle of justice--withhowever good motives at bottom--what must be expected from otherCaptains not so eminently gifted with noble traits as Collingwood?
And if the corps of American midshipmen is mostly replenished from thenursery, the counter, and the lap of unrestrained indulgence at home:and if most of them at least, by their impotency as officers, in allimportant functions at sea, by their boyish and overweening conceit oftheir gold lace, by their overbearing manner toward the seamen, and bytheir peculiar aptitude to construe the merest trivialities of mannerinto set affronts against their dignity; if by all this they sometimescontract the ill-will of the seamen; and if, in a thousand ways, theseamen cannot but betray it--how easy for any of these midshipmen, whomay happen to be unrestrained by moral principle, to resort to spitefulpractices in procuring vengeance upon the offenders, in many instancesto the extremity of the lash; since, as we have seen, the tacitprinciple in the Navy seems to be that, in his ordinary intercoursewith the sailors, a midshipman can do nothing obnoxious to the publiccensure of his superiors.
"You fellow, I'll get you _licked_ before long," is often heard from amidshipman to a sailor who, in some way not open to the judicial actionof the Captain, has chanced to offend him.
At times you will see one of these lads, not five feet high, gazing upwith inflamed eye at some venerable six-footer of a forecastle man,cursing and insulting him by every epithet deemed most scandalous andunendurable among men. Yet that man's indignant tongue istreble-knotted by the law, that suspends death itself over his headshould his passion discharge the slightest blow at the boy-worm thatspits at his feet.
But since what human nature is, and what it must for ever continue tobe, is well enough understood for most practical purposes, it needs nospecial example to prove that, where the merest boys, indiscriminatelysnatched from the human family, are given such authority over maturemen, the results must be proportionable in monstrousness to the customthat authorises this worse than cruel absurdity.
Nor is it unworthy of remark that, while the noblest-minded and mostheroic sea-officers--men of the topmost stature, including Lord Nelsonhimself--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 butfew midshipmen who were not enthusiastic advocates and admirers ofscourging. It would almost seem that they themselves, having sorecently escaped the posterior discipline of the nursery and the infantschool, are impatient to recover from those smarting reminiscences bymincing the backs of full-grown American freemen.
It should not to be omitted here, that the midshipmen in the EnglishNavy are not permitted to be quite so imperious as in the Americanships. They are divided into three (I think) probationary classes of"volunteers," instead of being at once advanced to a warrant. Nor willyou fail to remark, when you see an English cutter officered by one ofthose volunteers, that the boy does not so strut and slap his dirk-hiltwith a Bobadil air, and anticipatingly feel of the place where hiswarlike 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-boweranchors on their lapels in the American Navy.
Yet it must be confessed that at times you see midshipmen who are noblelittle fellows, and not at all disliked by the crew. Besides threegallant youths, one black-eyed little lad in particular, in theNeversink, was such a one. From his diminutiveness, he went by the nameof _Boat Plug_ among the seamen. Without being exactly familiar withthem, he had yet become a general favourite, by reason of his kindnessof manner, and never cursing them. It was amusing to hear some of theolder Tritons invoke blessings upon the youngster, when his kind tonesfell 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 lattersentence. _You have a soul to be saved_, is the phrase which aman-of-war's-man peculiarly applies to a humane and kind-heartedofficer. It also implies that the major
ity of quarter-deck officers areregarded by them in such a light that they deny to them the possessionof souls. Ah! but these plebeians sometimes have a sublime vengeanceupon patricians. Imagine an outcast old sailor seriously cherishing thepurely speculative conceit that some bully in epaulets, who orders himto and fro like a slave, is of an organization immeasurably inferior tohimself; must at last perish with the brutes, while he goes to hisimmortality in heaven.
But from what has been said in this chapter, it must not be inferredthat a midshipman leads a lord's life in a man-of-war. Far from it. Helords it over those below him, while lorded over himself by hissuperiors. It is as if with one hand a school-boy snapped his fingersat a dog, and at the same time received upon the other the disciplineof the usher's ferule. And though, by the American Articles of War, aNavy Captain cannot, of his own authority, legally punish a midshipman,otherwise than by suspension from duty (the same as with respect to theWard-room officers), yet this is one of those sea-statutes which theCaptain, to a certain extent, observes or disregards at his pleasure.Many instances might be related of the petty mortifications andofficial insults inflicted by some Captains upon their midshipmen; farmore severe, in one sense, than the old-fashioned punishment of sendingthem to the mast-head, though not so arbitrary as sending them beforethe mast, to do duty with the common sailors--a custom, in formertimes, 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 fallenunder his displeasure, he interrupted the humble apologies he wasmaking, by saying, "Not a word, sir! I'll not hear a word! Mount thenetting, 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 hima most aggravating lecture upon his alleged misconduct. To a lad ofsensibility, such treatment must have been almost as stinging as thelash itself would have been.
It is to be remembered that, wherever these chapters treat ofmidshipmen, the officers known as passed-midshipmen are not at allreferred to. In the American Navy, these officers form a class of youngmen, who, having seen sufficient service at sea as midshipmen to passan examination before a Board of Commodores, are promoted to the rankof passed-midshipmen, introductory to that of lieutenant. They aresupposed to be qualified to do duty as lieutenants, and in some casestemporarily serve as such. The difference between a passed-midshipmanand a midshipman may be also inferred from their respective rates ofpay. The former, upon sea-service, receives $750 a year; the latter,$400. There were no passed-midshipmen in the Neversink.