not too strong. Having been built about 1840, she represented the
culmination of the sail era, which, judged by her, reached then the
splendid maturity that in itself, to the prophetic eye, presages decay
and vanishment. In her just but strong proportions, in her lines, fine
yet not delicate, she "seemed to dare," and did dare, "the elements to
strife;" while for "her peopled deck," when her five hundred and odd
men swarmed up for an evolution, or to get their hammocks for the
night, it was peopled to the square foot, despite her size. On her
forecastle, and to the fore and main masts, each, were stationed sixty
men, full half of them prime seamen, not only in skill, but in age and
physique--ninety for the starboard watch, and ninety for the port; not
to count the mizzen-topmen, after-guard, and marines, more than as
many more. I have always remembered the effect produced upon me by
this huge mass, when all hands gathered once to wear ship in a heavy
gale, the height of one of those furious _pamperos_ which issue from
the prairies (_pampas_) of Buenos Ayres. The ship having only fore and
main topsails, close reefed, the officers, beyond those of the watch,
were not summoned; the handling of the yards required only the brute
force of muscle, under which, even in such conditions, they were as
toys in the hands of that superb ship's company. I had thus the chance
to see things from the poop, a kind of bird's-eye view. As the ship
fell off before the wind, and while the captain was waiting that
smoother chance which from time to time offers to bring her up to it
again on the other side with the least shock, she of course gathered
accelerated way with the gale right aft--scudding, in fact. Unsteadied
by wind on either side, she rolled deeply, and the sight of those four
hundred or more faces, all turned up and aft, watching intently the
officer of the deck for the next order, the braces stretched taut
along in their hands for instant obedience, was singularly striking.
Usually a midshipman had to be in the midst of such matters with no
leisure for impressions--at least, of an "impressionist" character.
Those were the prerogatives of the idlers--the surgeon, chaplain, and
marine officers--who obtained thereby not only the benefit of the
show, but material for discussion as to how well the thing had been
done, or whether it ought to have been done at all. The midshipman's
part at "all hands" was to be as much in the way as was necessary to
see all needed gear manned, no skulkers, and as much out of the way as
his personal stability required, from the rush of the huge gangs of
seamen "running away" with a rope.
I never had the opportunity of viewing the ship from outside under way
at sea; but she was delightful to look at in port. Her spars, both
masts and yards, lofty and yet square, were as true to proportion, for
perfection of appearance, as was her hull; and the twenty-five guns
she showed on each broadside, in two tiers, though they had abundance
of working-room, were close enough together to suggest two strong rows
of solid teeth, ready for instant use. Nothing could be more
splendidly martial. But what old-timers they were, with the swell of
their black muzzles, like the lips of a full-blooded negro.
Thirty-two-pounders, all of them; except on either side five
eight-inch shell guns, a small tribute to progress. The rest threw
solid shot for the most part. Imposing as they certainly looked, and
heavier though they were than most of those with which the world's
famous sea-fights have been fought, they were already antediluvian. A
few years later I saw a long range of them enjoying their last repose
on the skids in a navy-yard; and a bystander, with equal truth and
irreverence, called them pop-guns. One almost felt that the word
should be uttered in a whisper, out of respect for their feelings. But
the whole equipment of the ship, though up to date in itself, was so
far of the past that I recall it with mingled pathos and interest.
What naval officer who may read these words was ever shipmate with
rope "trusses" for the lower yards, or with a hemp messenger? A
"messenger" was a huge rope, of I suppose eighteen to twenty-four
inches circumference, used for lifting the anchor. At the after end of
the ship it was passed three times round the capstan, where the men
walking round merrily to the sound of the fife, under the eyes of the
officer of the deck, were doing the work of weighing; at the forward
end it moved round rollers to save friction. Thus one part was taut
under the strain of the capstan; and to this the cable of the anchor,
as it was hove in, was made fast by a succession of selvagees, for
which I will borrow the elaborate description of White Jacket, who
tells us the name was applied by the seamen of his ship to one of the
lieutenants: "It is a slender, tapering, unstranded piece of rope,
prepared with much solicitude; peculiarly flexible; which wreathes and
serpentines round the cable and messenger like an elegantly modelled
garter-snake round the stalks of a vine." The messenger thus was
appropriately named; it went back and forth on its errand of anchor
raising, the slack side being helped on its way by a row of twelve or
fifteen men seated, pulling it along forward. This gang, by immemorial
usage, was composed of the colored servants, and I can see now that
row of black faces, with grinning ivories, as they yo-ho'd in
undertones together, "lighting forward the messenger."
Like the ship and her equipment, the officers and crew by training and
methods were still of the olden time in tone and ideals; a condition,
of course, fostered at the moment by the style of vessel. Yet they had
that curious adaptability characteristic of the profession, which
afterwards enabled them to fall readily into the use of the new
constructions of every kind evolved by the War of Secession.
Concerning some of these, a naval professional humorist observed that
they could be worshipped without idolatry; for they were like nothing
in heaven, or on earth, or in the waters under the earth. Adored or
not, they were handled to purpose. By a paradoxical combination, the
seaman of those days was at once most conservative in temperament and
versatile in capacity. Among the officers, however, there was an open
vision towards the future. I well remember "Joe" Smith enlarging to me
on the merits of Cowper Coles's projected turret ship, much talked
about in the British press in 1860; a full year or more before
Ericsson, under the exigency of existing war, obtained from us a
hearing for the _Monitor_. Coles's turrets, being then a novel
project, were likened, explanatorily, to a railway turn-table, a very
illustrative definition; and Smith was already convinced of the value
of the design, which was proved in Hampton Roads the day after he
himself fell gloriously on the deck of the _Congress_. There is a
double tragedy in his missing by this brief space the clear
demonstration of a system to which he so early gave his adherence; and
it is another tragedy, which most Americans except naval officers will
have forgotten, that Coles himself found his grave in the ship--the
_Captain_--ultimately built through his urgency upon this turret
principle. This happened in 1870. The tradition of masts and sails, as
economical, still surviving, she was equipped with them, which we from
the beginning had discarded in monitors. The _Captain_ was a large
vessel with low freeboard, her deck only six feet above water. Lying
to under sail in a moderate gale, in the Bay of Biscay, she heeled
over in a squall, bringing the lee side of the deck under water; and
the force of the wind increasing, without meeting the resistance
offered ordinarily by the pressure of the water against the lee side
of a ship, she went clean over and sank. The incident made the deeper
impression upon me because two months before I had visited her, when
she was lying at Spithead in company with another iron-clad, the
_Monarch_, which soon after was assigned by the British government to
bring George Peabody's remains to their final resting-place in
America. I then met and was courteously received by the captain of the
_Captain_, Burgoyne, of the same family as the general known to our
War of Independence. Coles had gone merely as a passenger, to observe
the practical working of his designs. I do not know how far the
masting was consonant to his wishes. It may have been forced upon him
as a concession, necessary to obtain his main end; but nothing could
be more incongruous than to embarrass the all-round fire of turrets by
masts and rigging.
In 1859 the United States government was coquetting with the title
"Admiral," which was supposed to have some insidious connection with
monarchical institutions. Even so sensible and thoughtful a man as our
sailmaker, who was a devout disciple and constant reader of Horace
Greeley, with the advanced political tendencies of the _Tribune_, said
to me: "Call them admirals! Never! They will be wanting to be dukes
next." We had hit, therefore, on a compromise, quite accordant with
the transition decade 1850-1860, and styled them flag-officers;
concerning which it might be said that all admirals are
flag-officers, but all flag-officers were not admirals--not American
flag-officers, at all events. As a further element in the compromise,
instead of the broad swallow-tailed pendant of a commodore, our
previous flag-rank, we carried the square flag at the mizzen
indicative in all navies of a rear-admiral, to which we gave a
rear-admiral's salute of thirteen guns, and expected the same from
foreigners; while all the time the recipient stood on our _Navy
Register_ as a captain, only temporarily brevetted Flag-officer. Well
do I remember the dismay of our flag-officer when, quitting a British
ship of war, she fired the customary salute, and stopped at eleven--a
commodore's perquisite. The hit was harder, because the old gentleman
was particularly fond of the English, having received from them great
hospitality incidental to his commanding the ship of war which carried
part of the American exhibition to the World's Fair of 1851. An "_Et
tu, Brute_" expression came over his face, as he sank back with a
sorrowful exclamation in the stern-sheets of the barge, which, as
nautical convention requires, was lying motionless, oars horizontal, a
ship's-length away; when, lo and behold, as a kind of appendix to the
previous proceedings, bang! bang! went two more guns, filling the
baker's dozen. It was, of course, somewhat limping, but the apology
was sufficient.
Salutes are as liable to accidents as are other affairs of
well-regulated households, and a little more so; a gun misses fire, or
somebody counts wrong, or what not. On the _Congress_ we rarely had
trouble, for the greatest number of guns is twenty-one--a national
salute--and on our main deck we had thirty, any part of which could be
ready. If one missed fire, the gun next abaft stepped in. If near
enough, you might hear the primer snap, but the error of interval was
barely appreciable--the effect stood. Laymen may not know that the
manner of the salute was, and is, for the officer conducting it to
give the orders, "Starboard, fire!" "Port, fire!" the discharges thus
ranging from forward, aft, alternately on each side. A man who cannot
trust his ear times the interval by watch; most, I presume, trust
their counting. I once underwent an amusing _faux pas_ in this matter
of counting. Of course, the count is a serious matter; gun for gun is
diplomatically as important as an eye for an eye. My captain had heard
that an excellent precaution was to provide one's self with a
number of dried beans--with which, needless to say, a ship
abounds--corresponding to the number of guns. The receipt ran: Put
them all in one pocket, and with each gun shift a bean to the other
pocket. He proposed this to me, but I demurred; I feared I might get
mixed on the beans and omit to shift one. He did not press me, but
when I began to perform on the main deck he stood near the hatch on
the deck above, duly--or unduly--provided with beans. It was a
national salute; to the port. When I finished, he called to me: "You
have only fired twenty guns." "No, sir," I replied; "twenty-one."
"No," he repeated, "twenty; for I have a bean left." "All right!" I
returned, and I banged an appendix; after which, upon counting, it was
found the captain had twenty-two beans and the French twenty-two
guns--a "tiger" which I hope they appreciated, but am sure they did
not "return."
Our flag-officer was a veteran of 1812. He had evidently been very
handsome, to which possibly he owed three successive wives, the last
one much younger than himself. Now, in his sixties, he was still light
in his movements. He had a queer way of tripping along on the balls of
his feet, with a half-shuffling movement, his hands buried in his
pockets, with the thumbs out. He was, I fear, the sort of man capable
of wearing a frock-coat unbuttoned. It was amusing to see him walk the
poop with the captain of the ship, who out topped him by a head, was
ponderous in dimensions, with wide tread and feet like an elephant's;
yet, it was said by those who had seen, a beautiful waltzer. His son,
who was his clerk, used to say: "The old man's feet really aren't so
big, if he would not wear such shoes." When his shoes were sent up to
dry in the sun, as all sea-shoes must be at times, the midshipmen knew
the occasion as a gunboat parade. The flag-officer was styled
familiarly in the navy by the epithet Buckey; I never saw it spelled,
but the pronunciation was as given. Report ran that he thus called
every one, promiscuously; but, although I was his aide for nearly six
months, I only heard him use it once or twice. Possibly he was
breaking a bad habit.
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 ----."