SMOKING-CLUB IN A MAN-OF-WAR, WITH SCENES ON THE GUN-DECK DRAWING NEAR
HOME.
There is a fable about a painter moved by Jove to the painting of the
head of Medusa. Though the picture was true to the life, yet the poor
artist sickened at the sight of what his forced pencil had drawn. Thus,
borne through my task toward the end, my own soul now sinks at what I
myself have portrayed. But let us forget past chapters, if we may,
while we paint less repugnant things.
Metropolitan gentlemen have their club; provincial gossipers their
news-room; village quidnuncs their barber’s shop; the Chinese their
opium-houses; American Indians their council-fire; and even cannibals
their _Noojona_, or Talk-Stone, where they assemble at times to discuss
the affairs of the day. Nor is there any government, however despotic,
that ventures to deny to the least of its subjects the privilege of a
sociable chat. Not the Thirty Tyrants even—the clubbed post-captains of
old Athens—could stop the wagging tongues at the street-corners. For
chat man must; and by our immortal Bill of Rights, that guarantees to
us liberty of speech, chat we Yankees will, whether on board a frigate,
or on board our own terra-firma plantations.
In men-of-war, the Galley, or Cookery, on the gun-deck, is the grand
centre of gossip and news among the sailors. Here crowds assemble to
chat away the half-hour elapsing after every meal. The reason why this
place and these hours are selected rather than others is this: in the
neighbourhood of the galley alone, and only after meals, is the
man-of-war’s-man permitted to regale himself with a smoke.
A sumptuary edict, truly, that deprived White-Jacket, for one, of a
luxury to which he had long been attached. For how can the mystical
motives, the capricious impulses of a luxurious smoker go and come at
the beck of a Commodore’s command? No! when I smoke, be it because of
my sovereign good pleasure I choose so to do, though at so unseasonable
an hour that I send round the town for a brasier of coals. What! smoke
by a sun-dial? Smoke on compulsion? Make a trade, a business, a vile
recurring calling of smoking? And, perhaps, when those sedative fumes
have steeped you in the grandest of reveries, and, circle over circle,
solemnly rises some immeasurable dome in your soul—far away, swelling
and heaving into the vapour you raise—as if from one Mozart’s grandest
marches of a temple were rising, like Venus from the sea—at such a
time, to have your whole Parthenon tumbled about your ears by the knell
of the ship’s bell announcing the expiration of the half-hour for
smoking! Whip me, ye Furies! toast me in saltpetre! smite me, some
thunderbolt! charge upon me, endless squadrons of Mamalukes! devour me,
Feejees! but preserve me from a tyranny like this!
No! though I smoked like an Indian summer ere I entered the Neversink,
so abhorrent was this sumptuary law that I altogether abandoned the
luxury rather than enslave it to a time and a place. Herein did I not
right, Ancient and Honourable Old Guard of Smokers all round the world?
But there were others of the crew not so fastidious as myself. After
every meal, they hied to the galley and solaced their souls with a
whiff.
Now a bunch of cigars, all banded together, is a type and a symbol of
the brotherly love between smokers. Likewise, for the time, in a
community of pipes is a community of hearts! Nor was it an ill thing
for the Indian Sachems to circulate their calumet tobacco-bowl—even as
our own forefathers circulated their punch-bowl—in token of peace,
charity, and good-will, friendly feelings, and sympathising souls. And
this it was that made the gossipers of the galley so loving a club, so
long as the vapoury bond united them.
It was a pleasant sight to behold them. Grouped in the recesses between
the guns, they chatted and laughed like rows of convivialists in the
boxes of some vast dining-saloon. Take a Flemish kitchen full of good
fellows from Teniers; add a fireside group from Wilkie; throw in a
naval sketch from Cruickshank; and then stick a short pipe into every
mother’s son’s mouth, and you have the smoking scene at the galley of
the Neversink.
Not a few were politicians; and, as there were some thoughts of a war
with England at the time, their discussions waxed warm.
“I tell you what it is, _shippies!_” cried the old captain of gun No. 1
on the forecastle, “if that ’ere President of ourn don’t luff up into
the wind, by the Battle of the Nile! he’ll be getting us into a grand
fleet engagement afore the Yankee nation has rammed home her
cartridges—let alone blowing the match!”
“Who talks of luffing?” roared a roystering fore-top-man. “Keep our
Yankee nation large before the wind, say I, till you come plump on the
enemy’s bows, and then board him in the smoke,” and with that, there
came forth a mighty blast from his pipe.
“Who says the old man at the helm of the Yankee nation can’t steer his
_trick_ as well as George Washington himself?” cried a
sheet-anchor-man.
“But they say he’s a cold-water customer, Bill,” cried another; “and
sometimes o’ nights I somehow has a presentation that he’s goin’ to
stop our grog.”
“D’ye hear there, fore and aft!” roared the boatswain’s mate at the
gangway, “all hands tumble up, and ’bout ship!”
“That’s the talk!” cried the captain of gun No. 1, as, in obedience to
the summons, all hands dropped their pipes and crowded toward the
ladders, “and that’s what the President must do—go in stays, my lads,
and put the Yankee nation on the other tack.”
But these political discussions by no means supplied the staple of
conversation for the gossiping smokers of the galley. The interior
affairs of the frigate itself formed their principal theme. Rumours
about the private life of the Commodore in his cabin; about the
Captain, in his; about the various officers in the ward-room; about the
_reefers_ in the steerage, and their madcap frolickings, and about a
thousand other matters touching the crew themselves; all these—forming
the eternally shifting, domestic by-play of a man-of-war—proved
inexhaustible topics for our quidnuncs.
The animation of these scenes was very much heightened as we drew
nearer and nearer our port; it rose to a climax when the frigate was
reported to be only twenty-four hours’ sail from the land. What they
should do when they landed; how they should invest their wages; what
they should eat; what they should drink; and what lass they should
marry—these were the topics which absorbed them.
“Sink the sea!” cried a forecastle man. “Once more ashore, and you’ll
never again catch old Boombolt afloat. I mean to settle down in a
sail-loft.”
“Cable-tier pinchers blister all tarpaulin hats!” cried a young
after-guard’s-man; “I mean to go back to the counter.”
“Shipmates! take me by the arms, and swab up the lee-scuppers with me,
but I mean to steer a clam-cart before I go again to a ship’s wheel.
Let the Navy go by the board—to sea again, I won’t!”
“Start my soul-bolts, maties, if any more Blue Peters and sailing
signals fly at my fore!” cried the Captain of the Head. “My wages will
buy a wheelbarrow, if nothing more.”
“I have taken my last dose of salts,” said the Captain of the Waist,
“and after this mean to stick to fresh water. Ay, maties, ten of us
Waisters mean to club together and buy a _serving-mallet boat_, d’ye
see; and if ever we drown, it will be in the ‘raging canal!’ Blast the
sea, shipmates! say I.”
“Profane not the holy element!” said Lemsford, the poet of the
gun-deck, leaning over a cannon. “Know ye not, man-of-war’s-men! that
by the Parthian magi the ocean was held sacred? Did not Tiridates, the
Eastern monarch, take an immense land circuit to avoid desecrating the
Mediterranean, in order to reach his imperial master, Nero, and do
homage for his crown?”
“What lingo is that?” cried the Captain of the Waist.
“Who’s Commodore Tiddery-eye?” cried the forecastle-man.
“Hear me out,” resumed Lemsford. “Like Tiridates, I venerate the sea,
and venerate it so highly, shipmates, that evermore I shall abstain
from crossing it. In _that_ sense, Captain of the Waist, I echo your
cry.”
It was, indeed, a remarkable fact, that nine men out of every ten of
the Neversink’s crew had formed some plan or other to keep themselves
ashore for life, or, at least, on fresh water, after the expiration of
the present cruise. With all the experiences of that cruise accumulated
in one intense recollection of a moment; with the smell of tar in their
nostrils; out of sight of land; with a stout ship under foot, and
snuffing the ocean air; with all the things of the sea surrounding
them; in their cool, sober moments of reflection; in the silence and
solitude of the deep, during the long night-watches, when all their
holy home associations were thronging round their hearts; in the
spontaneous piety and devotion of the last hours of so long a voyage;
in the fullness and the frankness of their souls; when there was naught
to jar the well-poised equilibrium of their judgment—under all these
circumstances, at least nine tenths of a crew of five hundred
man-of-war’s-men resolved for ever to turn their backs on the sea. But
do men ever hate the thing they love? Do men forswear the hearth and
the homestead? What, then, must the Navy be?
But, alas for the man-of-war’s-man, who, though he may take a Hannibal
oath against the service; yet, cruise after cruise, and after
forswearing it again and again, he is driven back to the spirit-tub and
the gun-deck by his old hereditary foe, the ever-devilish god of grog.
On this point, let some of the crew of the Neversink be called to the
stand.
You, Captain of the Waist! and you, seamen of the fore-top! and you,
after-guard’s-men and others! how came you here at the guns of the
North Carolina, after registering your solemn vows at the galley of the
Neversink?
They all hang their heads. I know the cause; poor fellows! perjure
yourselves not again; swear not at all hereafter.
Ay, these very tars—the foremost in denouncing the Navy; who had bound
themselves by the most tremendous oaths—these very men, not three days
after getting ashore, were rolling round the streets in penniless
drunkenness; and next day many of them were to be found on board of the
_guardo_ or receiving-ship. Thus, in part, is the Navy manned.
But what was still more surprising, and tended to impart a new and
strange insight into the character of sailors, and overthrow some
long-established ideas concerning them as a class, was this: numbers of
men who, during the cruise, had passed for exceedingly prudent, nay,
parsimonious persons, who would even refuse you a patch, or a needleful
of thread, and, from their stinginess, procured the name of
_Ravelings_—no sooner were these men fairly adrift in harbour, and
under the influence of frequent quaffings, than their
three-years’-earned wages flew right and left; they summoned whole
boarding-houses of sailors to the bar, and treated them over and over
again. Fine fellows! generous-hearted tars! Seeing this sight, I
thought to myself, Well, these generous-hearted tars on shore were the
greatest curmudgeons afloat! it’s the bottle that’s generous, not they!
Yet the popular conceit concerning a sailor is derived from his
behaviour ashore; whereas, ashore he is no longer a sailor, but a
landsman for the time. A man-of-war’s-man is only a man-of-war’s-man at
sea; and the sea is the place to learn what he is. But we have seen
that a man-of-war is but this old-fashioned world of ours afloat, full
of all manner of characters—full of strange contradictions; and though
boasting some fine fellows here and there, yet, upon the whole, charged
to the combings of her hatchways with the spirit of Belial and all
unrighteousness.