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- 14337
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- uttermost point on their main-mast.
Thus they reason: Secure of this antagonism between the marine and the
sailor, we can always rely upon it, that if the sailor mutinies, it
needs no great incitement for the marine to thrust his bayonet through
his heart; if the marine revolts, the pike of the sailor is impatient
to charge. Checks and balances, blood against blood, _that_ is the cry
and the argument.
What applies to the relation in which the marine and sailor stand
toward each other—the mutual repulsion implied by a system of
checks—will, in degree, apply to nearly the entire interior of a
man-of-war’s discipline. The whole body of this discipline is
emphatically a system of cruel cogs and wheels, systematically grinding
up in one common hopper all that might minister to the moral well-being
of the crew.
It is the same with both officers and men. If a Captain have a grudge
against a Lieutenant, or a Lieutenant against a midshipman, how easy to
torture him by official treatment, which shall not lay open the
superior officer to legal rebuke. And if a midshipman bears a grudge
against a sailor, how easy for him, by cunning practices, born of a
boyish spite, to have him degraded at the gangway. Through all the
endless ramifications of rank and station, in most men-of-war there
runs a sinister vein of bitterness, not exceeded by the fireside
hatreds in a family of stepsons ashore. It were sickening to detail all
the paltry irritabilities, jealousies, and cabals, the spiteful
detractions and animosities, that lurk far down, and cling to the very
kelson of the ship. It is unmanning to think of. The immutable
ceremonies and iron etiquette of a man-of-war; the spiked barriers
separating the various grades of rank; the delegated absolutism of
authority on all hands; the impossibility, on the part of the common
seaman, of appeal from incidental abuses, and many more things that
might be enumerated, all tend to beget in most armed ships a general
social condition which is the precise reverse of what any Christian
could desire. And though there are vessels, that in some measure
furnish exceptions to this; and though, in other ships, the thing may
be glazed over by a guarded, punctilious exterior, almost completely
hiding the truth from casual visitors, while the worst facts touching
the common sailor are systematically kept in the background, yet it is
certain that what has here been said of the domestic interior of a
man-of-war will, in a greater or less degree, apply to most vessels in
the Navy. It is not that the officers are so malevolent, nor,
altogether, that the man-of-war’s-man is so vicious. Some of these
evils are unavoidably generated through the operation of the Naval
code; others are absolutely organic to a Navy establishment, and, like
other organic evils, are incurable, except when they dissolve with the
body they live in.
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