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- 14129
- extracted_at
- 2026-01-30T20:48:36.278Z
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- 14067
- text
- cases, it is almost certain that not a sou’s worth of satisfaction
would have been received.
I know not in what frigate you sail now, old Ushant; but Heaven protect
your storied old beard, in whatever Typhoon it may blow. And if ever it
must be shorn, old man, may it fare like the royal beard of Henry I.,
of England, and be clipped by the right reverend hand of some
Archbishop of Sees.
As for Captain Claret, let it not be supposed that it is here sought to
impale him before the world as a cruel, black-hearted man. Such he was
not. Nor was he, upon the whole, regarded by his crew with anything
like the feelings which man-of-war’s-men sometimes cherish toward
signally tyrannical commanders. In truth, the majority of the
Neversink’s crew—in previous cruises habituated to flagrant
misusage—deemed Captain Claret a lenient officer. In many things he
certainly refrained from oppressing them. It has been related what
privileges he accorded to the seamen respecting the free playing of
checkers—a thing almost unheard of in most American men-of-war. In the
matter of overseeing the men’s clothing, also, he was remarkably
indulgent, compared with the conduct of other Navy captains, who, by
sumptuary regulations, oblige their sailors to run up large bills with
the Purser for clothes. In a word, of whatever acts Captain Claret
might have been guilty in the Neversink, perhaps none of them proceeded
from any personal, organic hard-heartedness. What he was, the usages of
the Navy had made him. Had he been a mere landsman—a merchant, say—he
would no doubt have been considered a kind-hearted man.
There may be some who shall read of this Bartholomew Massacre of beards
who will yet marvel, perhaps, that the loss of a few hairs, more or
less, should provoke such hostility from the sailors, lash them into so
frothing a rage; indeed, come near breeding a mutiny.
But these circumstances are not without precedent. Not to speak of the
riots, attended with the loss of life, which once occurred in Madrid,
in resistance to an arbitrary edict of the king’s, seeking to suppress
the cloaks of the Cavaliers; and, not to make mention of other
instances that might be quoted, it needs only to point out the rage of
the Saxons in the time of William the Conqueror, when that despot
commanded the hair on their upper lips to be shaven off—the hereditary
mustaches which whole generations had sported. The multitude of the
dispirited vanquished were obliged to acquiesce; but many Saxon
Franklins and gentlemen of spirit, choosing rather to lose their
castles than their mustaches, voluntarily deserted their firesides, and
went into exile. All this is indignantly related by the stout Saxon
friar, Matthew Paris, in his _Historia Major_, beginning with the
Norman Conquest.
And that our man-of-war’s-men were right in desiring to perpetuate
their beards, as martial appurtenances, must seem very plain, when it
is considered that, as the beard is the token of manhood, so, in some
shape or other, has it ever been held the true badge of a warrior.
Bonaparte’s grenadiers were stout whiskerandoes; and perhaps, in a
charge, those fierce whiskers of theirs did as much to appall the foe
as the sheen of their bayonets. Most all fighting creatures sport
either whiskers or beards; it seems a law of Dame Nature. Witness the
boar, the tiger, the cougar, man, the leopard, the ram, the cat—all
warriors, and all whiskerandoes. Whereas, the peace-loving tribes have
mostly enameled chins.
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