SOMETHING CONCERNING MIDSHIPMEN.
It was the next morning after matchless Jack’s interview with the
Commodore and Captain, that a little incident occurred, soon forgotten
by the crew at large, but long remembered by the few seamen who were in
the habit of closely scrutinising every-day proceedings. Upon the face
of it, it was but a common event—at least in a man-of-war—the flogging
of a man at the gangway. But the under-current of circumstances in the
case were of a nature that magnified this particular flogging into a
matter of no small importance. The story itself cannot here be related;
it would not well bear recital: enough that the person flogged was a
middle-aged man of the Waist—a forlorn, broken-down, miserable object,
truly; one of those wretched landsmen sometimes driven into the Navy by
their unfitness for all things else, even as others are driven into the
workhouse. He was flogged at the complaint of a midshipman; and hereby
hangs the drift of the thing. For though this waister was so ignoble a
mortal, yet his being scourged on this one occasion indirectly
proceeded from the mere wanton spite and unscrupulousness of the
midshipman in question—a youth, who was apt to indulge at times in
undignified familiarities with some of the men, who, sooner or later,
almost always suffered from his capricious preferences.
But the leading principle that was involved in this affair is far too
mischievous to be lightly dismissed.
In most cases, it would seem to be a cardinal principle with a Navy
Captain that his subordinates are disintegrated parts of himself,
detached from the main body on special service, and that the order of
the minutest midshipman must be as deferentially obeyed by the seamen
as if proceeding from the Commodore on the poop. This principle was
once emphasised in a remarkable manner by the valiant and handsome Sir
Peter Parker, upon whose death, on a national arson expedition on the
shores of Chesapeake Bay, in 1812 or 1813, Lord Byron wrote his
well-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 hung
on a broomstick to dry!”
That the king, in the eye of the law, can do no wrong, is the
well-known fiction of despotic states; but it has remained for the
navies of Constitutional Monarchies and Republics to magnify this
fiction, by indirectly extending it to all the quarter-deck
subordinates of an armed ship’s chief magistrate. And though judicially
unrecognised, and unacknowledged by the officers themselves, yet this
is the principle that pervades the fleet; this is the principle that is
every hour acted upon, and to sustain which, thousands of seamen have
been flogged at the gangway.
However childish, ignorant, stupid, or idiotic a midshipman, if he but
orders a sailor to perform even the most absurd action, that man is not
only bound to render instant and unanswering obedience, but he would
refuse at his peril. And if, having obeyed, he should then complain to
the Captain, and the Captain, in his own mind, should be thoroughly
convinced of the impropriety, perhaps of the illegality of the order,
yet, in nine cases out of ten, he would not publicly reprimand the
midshipman, nor by the slightest token admit before the complainant
that, in this particular thing, the midshipman had done otherwise than
perfectly right.
Upon a midshipman’s complaining of a seaman to Lord Collingwood, when
Captain of a line-of-battle ship, he ordered the man for punishment;
and, in the interval, calling the midshipman aside, said to him, “In
all probability, now, the fault is yours—you know; therefore, when the
man is brought to the mast, you had better ask for his pardon.”
Accordingly, upon the lad’s public intercession, Collingwood, turning
to the culprit, said, “This young gentleman has pleaded so humanely for
you, 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 by
the editor of the Admiral’s “Correspondence,” to show the Admiral’s
kindheartedness.
Now Collingood was, in reality, one of the most just, humane, and
benevolent admirals that ever hoisted a flag. For a sea-officer,
Collingwood was a man in a million. But if a man like him, swayed by
old usages, could thus violate the commonest principle of justice—with
however good motives at bottom—what must be expected from other
Captains not so eminently gifted with noble traits as Collingwood?
And if the corps of American midshipmen is mostly replenished from the
nursery, the counter, and the lap of unrestrained indulgence at home:
and if most of them at least, by their impotency as officers, in all
important functions at sea, by their boyish and overweening conceit of
their gold lace, by their overbearing manner toward the seamen, and by
their peculiar aptitude to construe the merest trivialities of manner
into set affronts against their dignity; if by all this they sometimes
contract the ill-will of the seamen; and if, in a thousand ways, the
seamen cannot but betray it—how easy for any of these midshipmen, who
may happen to be unrestrained by moral principle, to resort to spiteful
practices in procuring vengeance upon the offenders, in many instances
to the extremity of the lash; since, as we have seen, the tacit
principle in the Navy seems to be that, in his ordinary intercourse
with the sailors, a midshipman can do nothing obnoxious to the public
censure of his superiors.
“You fellow, I’ll get you _licked_ before long,” is often heard from a
midshipman to a sailor who, in some way not open to the judicial action
of the Captain, has chanced to offend him.
At times you will see one of these lads, not five feet high, gazing up
with inflamed eye at some venerable six-footer of a forecastle man,
cursing and insulting him by every epithet deemed most scandalous and
unendurable among men. Yet that man’s indignant tongue is
treble-knotted by the law, that suspends death itself over his head
should his passion discharge the slightest blow at the boy-worm that
spits at his feet.
But since what human nature is, and what it must for ever continue to
be, is well enough understood for most practical purposes, it needs no
special example to prove that, where the merest boys, indiscriminately
snatched from the human family, are given such authority over mature
men, the results must be proportionable in monstrousness to the custom
that authorises this worse than cruel absurdity.
Nor is it unworthy of remark that, while the noblest-minded and most
heroic sea-officers—men of the topmost stature, including Lord Nelson
himself—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 but
few midshipmen who were not enthusiastic advocates and admirers of
scourging. It would almost seem that they themselves, having so
recently escaped the posterior discipline of the nursery and the infant
school, are impatient to recover from those smarting reminiscences by
mincing the backs of full-grown American freemen.
It should not to be omitted here, that the midshipmen in the English
Navy are not permitted to be quite so imperious as in the American
ships. They are divided into three (I think) probationary classes of
“volunteers,” instead of being at once advanced to a warrant. Nor will
you fail to remark, when you see an English cutter officered by one of
those volunteers, that the boy does not so strut and slap his dirk-hilt
with a Bobadil air, and anticipatingly feel of the place where his
warlike 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-bower
anchors on their lapels in the American Navy.
Yet it must be confessed that at times you see midshipmen who are noble
little fellows, and not at all disliked by the crew. Besides three
gallant youths, one black-eyed little lad in particular, in the
Neversink, was such a one. From his diminutiveness, he went by the name
of _Boat Plug_ among the seamen. Without being exactly familiar with
them, he had yet become a general favourite, by reason of his kindness
of manner, and never cursing them. It was amusing to hear some of the
older Tritons invoke blessings upon the youngster, when his kind tones
fell 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 latter
sentence. _You have a soul to be saved_, is the phrase which a
man-of-war’s-man peculiarly applies to a humane and kind-hearted
officer. It also implies that the majority of quarter-deck officers are
regarded by them in such a light that they deny to them the possession
of souls. Ah! but these plebeians sometimes have a sublime vengeance
upon patricians. Imagine an outcast old sailor seriously cherishing the
purely speculative conceit that some bully in epaulets, who orders him
to and fro like a slave, is of an organization immeasurably inferior to
himself; must at last perish with the brutes, while he goes to his
immortality in heaven.
But from what has been said in this chapter, it must not be inferred
that a midshipman leads a lord’s life in a man-of-war. Far from it. He
lords it over those below him, while lorded over himself by his
superiors. It is as if with one hand a school-boy snapped his fingers
at a dog, and at the same time received upon the other the discipline
of the usher’s ferule. And though, by the American Articles of War, a
Navy Captain cannot, of his own authority, legally punish a midshipman,
otherwise than by suspension from duty (the same as with respect to the
Ward-room officers), yet this is one of those sea-statutes which the
Captain, to a certain extent, observes or disregards at his pleasure.
Many instances might be related of the petty mortifications and
official insults inflicted by some Captains upon their midshipmen; far
more severe, in one sense, than the old-fashioned punishment of sending
them to the mast-head, though not so arbitrary as sending them before
the mast, to do duty with the common sailors—a custom, in former times,
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 fallen
under his displeasure, he interrupted the humble apologies he was
making, by saying, “Not a word, sir! I’ll not hear a word! Mount the
netting, 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 him
a most aggravating lecture upon his alleged misconduct. To a lad of
sensibility, such treatment must have been almost as stinging as the
lash itself would have been.
It is to be remembered that, wherever these chapters treat of
midshipmen, the officers known as passed-midshipmen are not at all
referred to. In the American Navy, these officers form a class of young
men, who, having seen sufficient service at sea as midshipmen to pass
an examination before a Board of Commodores, are promoted to the rank
of passed-midshipmen, introductory to that of lieutenant. They are
supposed to be qualified to do duty as lieutenants, and in some cases
temporarily serve as such. The difference between a passed-midshipman
and a midshipman may be also inferred from their respective rates of
pay. The former, upon sea-service, receives $750 a year; the latter,
$400. There were no passed-midshipmen in the Neversink.