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- 2026-01-30T20:48:36.274Z
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- 8316
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- CHAPTER LII.
SOMETHING CONCERNING MIDSHIPMEN.
It was the next morning after matchless Jack’s interview with the
Commodore and Captain, that a little incident occurred, soon forgotten
by the crew at large, but long remembered by the few seamen who were in
the habit of closely scrutinising every-day proceedings. Upon the face
of it, it was but a common event—at least in a man-of-war—the flogging
of a man at the gangway. But the under-current of circumstances in the
case were of a nature that magnified this particular flogging into a
matter of no small importance. The story itself cannot here be related;
it would not well bear recital: enough that the person flogged was a
middle-aged man of the Waist—a forlorn, broken-down, miserable object,
truly; one of those wretched landsmen sometimes driven into the Navy by
their unfitness for all things else, even as others are driven into the
workhouse. He was flogged at the complaint of a midshipman; and hereby
hangs the drift of the thing. For though this waister was so ignoble a
mortal, yet his being scourged on this one occasion indirectly
proceeded from the mere wanton spite and unscrupulousness of the
midshipman in question—a youth, who was apt to indulge at times in
undignified familiarities with some of the men, who, sooner or later,
almost always suffered from his capricious preferences.
But the leading principle that was involved in this affair is far too
mischievous to be lightly dismissed.
In most cases, it would seem to be a cardinal principle with a Navy
Captain that his subordinates are disintegrated parts of himself,
detached from the main body on special service, and that the order of
the minutest midshipman must be as deferentially obeyed by the seamen
as if proceeding from the Commodore on the poop. This principle was
once emphasised in a remarkable manner by the valiant and handsome Sir
Peter Parker, upon whose death, on a national arson expedition on the
shores of Chesapeake Bay, in 1812 or 1813, Lord Byron wrote his
well-known stanzas. “By the god of war!” said Sir Peter to his sailors,
“I’ll make you touch your hat to a midshipman’s coat, if it’s only hung
on a broomstick to dry!”
That the king, in the eye of the law, can do no wrong, is the
well-known fiction of despotic states; but it has remained for the
navies of Constitutional Monarchies and Republics to magnify this
fiction, by indirectly extending it to all the quarter-deck
subordinates of an armed ship’s chief magistrate. And though judicially
unrecognised, and unacknowledged by the officers themselves, yet this
is the principle that pervades the fleet; this is the principle that is
every hour acted upon, and to sustain which, thousands of seamen have
been flogged at the gangway.
However childish, ignorant, stupid, or idiotic a midshipman, if he but
orders a sailor to perform even the most absurd action, that man is not
only bound to render instant and unanswering obedience, but he would
refuse at his peril. And if, having obeyed, he should then complain to
the Captain, and the Captain, in his own mind, should be thoroughly
convinced of the impropriety, perhaps of the illegality of the order,
yet, in nine cases out of ten, he would not publicly reprimand the
midshipman, nor by the slightest token admit before the complainant
that, in this particular thing, the midshipman had done otherwise than
perfectly right.
Upon a midshipman’s complaining of a seaman to Lord Collingwood, when
Captain of a line-of-battle ship, he ordered the man for punishment;
and, in the interval, calling the midshipman aside, said to him, “In
all probability, now, the fault is yours—you know; therefore, when the
man is brought to the mast, you had better ask for his pardon.”
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