PUBLISHING POETRY IN A MAN-OF-WAR.
A day or two after our arrival in Rio, a rather amusing incident
occurred to a particular acquaintance of mine, young Lemsford, the
gun-deck bard.
The great guns of an armed ship have blocks of wood, called _tompions_,
painted black, inserted in their muzzles, to keep out the spray of the
sea. These tompions slip in and out very handily, like covers to butter
firkins.
By advice of a friend, Lemsford, alarmed for the fate of his box of
poetry, had latterly made use of a particular gun on the main-deck, in
the tube of which he thrust his manuscripts, by simply crawling partly
out of the porthole, removing the tompion, inserting his papers,
tightly rolled, and making all snug again.
Breakfast over, he and I were reclining in the main-top—where, by
permission of my noble master, Jack Chase, I had invited him—when, of a
sudden, we heard a cannonading. It was our own ship.
“Ah!” said a top-man, “returning the shore salute they gave us
yesterday.”
“O Lord!” cried Lemsford, “my _Songs of the Sirens!_” and he ran down
the rigging to the batteries; but just as he touched the gun-deck, gun
No. 20—his literary strong-box—went off with a terrific report.
“Well, my after-guard Virgil,” said Jack Chase to him, as he slowly
returned up the rigging, “did you get it? You need not answer; I see
you were too late. But never mind, my boy: no printer could do the
business for you better. That’s the way to publish, White-Jacket,”
turning to me—“fire it right into ’em; every canto a twenty-four-pound
shot; _hull_ the blockheads, whether they will or no. And mind you,
Lemsford, when your shot does the most execution, your hear the least
from the foe. A killed man cannot even lisp.”
“Glorious Jack!” cried Lemsford, running up and snatching him by the
hand, “say that again, Jack! look me in the eyes. By all the Homers,
Jack, you have made my soul mount like a balloon! Jack, I’m a poor
devil of a poet. Not two months before I shipped aboard here, I
published a volume of poems, very aggressive on the world, Jack. Heaven
knows what it cost me. I published it, Jack, and the cursed publisher
sued me for damages; my friends looked sheepish; one or two who liked
it were non-committal; and as for the addle-pated mob and rabble, they
thought they had found out a fool. Blast them, Jack, what they call the
public is a monster, like the idol we saw in Owhyhee, with the head of
a jackass, the body of a baboon, and the tail of a scorpion!”
“I don’t like that,” said Jack; “when I’m ashore, I myself am part of
the public.”
“Your pardon, Jack; you are not, you are then a part of the people,
just as you are aboard the frigate here. The public is one thing, Jack,
and the people another.”
“You are right,” said Jack; “right as this leg. Virgil, you are a
trump; you are a jewel, my boy. The public and the people! Ay, ay, my
lads, let us hate the one and cleave to the other.”