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- CHAPTER XC.
THE MANNING OF NAVIES.
“The gallows and the sea refuse nothing,” is a very old sea saying;
and, among all the wondrous prints of Hogarth, there is none remaining
more true at the present day than that dramatic boat-scene, where after
consorting with harlots and gambling on tomb-stones, the Idle
Apprentice, with the villainous low forehead, is at last represented as
being pushed off to sea, with a ship and a gallows in the distance. But
Hogarth should have converted the ship’s masts themselves into
Tyburn-trees, and thus, with the ocean for a background, closed the
career of his hero. It would then have had all the dramatic force of
the opera of Don Juan, who, after running his impious courses, is swept
from our sight in a tornado of devils.
For the sea is the true Tophet and bottomless pit of many workers of
iniquity; and, as the German mystics feign Gehennas within Gehennas,
even so are men-of-war familiarly known among sailors as “Floating
Hells.” And as the sea, according to old Fuller, is the stable of brute
monsters, gliding hither and thither in unspeakable swarms, even so is
it the home of many moral monsters, who fitly divide its empire with
the snake, the shark, and the worm.
Nor are sailors, and man-of-war’s-men especially, at all blind to a
true sense of these things. “_Purser rigged and parish damned_,” is the
sailor saying in the American Navy, when the tyro first mounts the
lined frock and blue jacket, aptly manufactured for him in a State
Prison ashore.
No wonder, that lured by some _crimp_ into a service so galling, and,
perhaps, persecuted by a vindictive lieutenant, some repentant sailors
have actually jumped into the sea to escape from their fate, or set
themselves adrift on the wide ocean on the gratings without compass or
rudder.
In one case, a young man, after being nearly cut into dog’s meat at the
gangway, loaded his pockets with shot and walked overboard.
Some years ago, I was in a whaling ship lying in a harbour of the
Pacific, with three French men-of-war alongside. One dark, moody night,
a suppressed cry was heard from the face of the waters, and, thinking
it was some one drowning, a boat was lowered, when two French sailors
were picked up, half dead from exhaustion, and nearly throttled by a
bundle of their clothes tied fast to their shoulders. In this manner
they had attempted their escape from their vessel. When the French
officers came in pursuit, these sailors, rallying from their
exhaustion, fought like tigers to resist being captured. Though this
story concerns a French armed ship, it is not the less applicable, in
degree, to those of other nations.
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