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- about dining with him. Nevertheless, he was a man to study and digest;
so, upon a little reflection; I was not displeased at his presence. It
amazed me, however, that he had wormed himself into the mess, since so
many of the other messes had declined the honour, until at last, I
ascertained that he had induced a mess-mate of ours, a distant relation
of his, to prevail upon the cook to admit him.
Now it would not have answered for hardly any other mess in the ship to
have received this man among them, for it would have torn a huge rent
in their reputation; but our mess, A. No. 1—the Forty-two-pounder
Club—was composed of so fine a set of fellows; so many captains of
tops, and quarter-masters—men of undeniable mark on board ship—of
long-established standing and consideration on the gun-deck; that, with
impunity, we could do so many equivocal things, utterly inadmissible
for messes of inferior pretension. Besides, though we all abhorred the
monster of Sin itself, yet, from our social superiority, highly
rarified education in our lofty top, and large and liberal sweep of the
aggregate of things, we were in a good degree free from those useless,
personal prejudices, and galling hatreds against conspicuous _sinners_,
not _Sin_—which so widely prevail among men of warped understandings
and unchristian and uncharitable hearts. No; the superstitions and
dogmas concerning Sin had not laid their withering maxims upon our
hearts. We perceived how that evil was but good disguised, and a knave
a saint in his way; how that in other planets, perhaps, what we deem
wrong, may there be deemed right; even as some substances, without
undergoing any mutations in themselves utterly change their colour,
according to the light thrown upon them. We perceived that the
anticipated millennium must have begun upon the morning the first words
were created; and that, taken all in all, our man-of-war world itself
was as eligible a round-sterned craft as any to be found in the Milky
Way. And we fancied that though some of us, of the gun-deck, were at
times condemned to sufferings and blights, and all manner of
tribulation and anguish, yet, no doubt, it was only our misapprehension
of these things that made us take them for woeful pains instead of the
most agreeable pleasures. I have dreamed of a sphere, says Pinzella,
where to break a man on the wheel is held the most exquisite of
delights you can confer upon him; where for one gentleman in any way to
vanquish another is accounted an everlasting dishonour; where to tumble
one into a pit after death, and then throw cold clods upon his upturned
face, is a species of contumely, only inflicted upon the most notorious
criminals.
But whatever we mess-mates thought, in whatever circumstances we found
ourselves, we never forgot that our frigate, had as it was, was
homeward-bound. Such, at least, were our reveries at times, though
sorely jarred, now and then, by events that took our philosophy aback.
For after all, philosophy—that is, the best wisdom that has ever in any
way been revealed to our man-of-war world—is but a slough and a mire,
with a few tufts of good footing here and there.
But there was one man in the mess who would have naught to do with our
philosophy—a churlish, ill-tempered, unphilosophical, superstitious old
bear of a quarter-gunner; a believer in Tophet, for which he was
accordingly preparing himself. Priming was his name; but methinks I
have spoken of him before.
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