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- CHAPTER LXXXIII.
A MAN-OF-WAR COLLEGE.
In our man-of-war world, Life comes in at one gangway and Death goes
overboard at the other. Under the man-of-war scourge, curses mix with
tears; and the sigh and the sob furnish the bass to the shrill octave
of those who laugh to drown buried griefs of their own. Checkers were
played in the waist at the time of Shenly’s burial; and as the body
plunged, a player swept the board. The bubbles had hardly burst, when
all hands were _piped down_ by the Boatswain, and the old jests were
heard again, as if Shenly himself were there to hear.
This man-of-war life has not left me unhardened. I cannot stop to weep
over Shenly now; that would be false to the life I depict; wearing no
mourning weeds, I resume the task of portraying our man-of-war world.
Among the various other vocations, all driven abreast on board of the
Neversink, was that of the schoolmaster. There were two academies in
the frigate. One comprised the apprentice boys, who, upon certain days
of the week, were indoctrinated in the mysteries of the primer by an
invalid corporal of marines, a slender, wizzen-cheeked man, who had
received a liberal infant-school education.
The other school was a far more pretentious affair—a sort of army and
navy seminary combined, where mystical mathematical problems were
solved by the midshipmen, and great ships-of-the-line were navigated
over imaginary shoals by unimaginable observations of the moon and the
stars, and learned lectures were delivered upon great guns, small arms,
and the curvilinear lines described by bombs in the air.
“_The Professor_” was the title bestowed upon the erudite gentleman who
conducted this seminary, and by that title alone was he known
throughout the ship. He was domiciled in the Ward-room, and circulated
there on a social par with the Purser, Surgeon, and other
_non-combatants_ and Quakers. By being advanced to the dignity of a
peerage in the Ward-room, Science and Learning were ennobled in the
person of this Professor, even as divinity was honoured in the Chaplain
enjoying the rank of a spiritual peer.
Every other afternoon, while at sea, the Professor assembled his pupils
on the half-deck, near the long twenty-four pounders. A bass drum-head
was his desk, his pupils forming a semicircle around him, seated on
shot-boxes and match-tubs.
They were in the jelly of youth, and this learned Professor poured into
their susceptible hearts all the gentle gunpowder maxims of war.
Presidents of Peace Societies and Superintendents of Sabbath-schools,
must it not have been a most interesting sight?
But the Professor himself was a noteworthy person. A tall, thin,
spectacled man, about forty years old, with a student’s stoop in his
shoulders, and wearing uncommonly scanty pantaloons, exhibiting an
undue proportion of his boots. In early life he had been a cadet in the
military academy of West Point; but, becoming very weak-sighted, and
thereby in a good manner disqualified for active service in the field,
he had declined entering the army, and accepted the office of Professor
in the Navy.
His studies at West Point had thoroughly grounded him in a knowledge of
gunnery; and, as he was not a little of a pedant, it was sometimes
amusing, when the sailors were at quarters, to hear him criticise their
evolutions at the batteries. He would quote Dr. Hutton’s Tracts on the
subject, also, in the original, “_The French Bombardier_,” and wind up
by Italian passages from the “_Prattica Manuale dell’ Artiglieria_.”
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