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- one who has seen much of midshipmen can truly say that he has seen but
few midshipmen who were not enthusiastic advocates and admirers of
scourging. It would almost seem that they themselves, having so
recently escaped the posterior discipline of the nursery and the infant
school, are impatient to recover from those smarting reminiscences by
mincing the backs of full-grown American freemen.
It should not to be omitted here, that the midshipmen in the English
Navy are not permitted to be quite so imperious as in the American
ships. They are divided into three (I think) probationary classes of
“volunteers,” instead of being at once advanced to a warrant. Nor will
you fail to remark, when you see an English cutter officered by one of
those volunteers, that the boy does not so strut and slap his dirk-hilt
with a Bobadil air, and anticipatingly feel of the place where his
warlike whiskers are going to be, and sputter out oaths so at the men,
as is too often the case with the little boys wearing best-bower
anchors on their lapels in the American Navy.
Yet it must be confessed that at times you see midshipmen who are noble
little fellows, and not at all disliked by the crew. Besides three
gallant youths, one black-eyed little lad in particular, in the
Neversink, was such a one. From his diminutiveness, he went by the name
of _Boat Plug_ among the seamen. Without being exactly familiar with
them, he had yet become a general favourite, by reason of his kindness
of manner, and never cursing them. It was amusing to hear some of the
older Tritons invoke blessings upon the youngster, when his kind tones
fell on their weather-beaten ears. “Ah, good luck to you, sir!”
touching their hats to the little man; “you have a soul to be saved,
sir!” There was a wonderful deal of meaning involved in the latter
sentence. _You have a soul to be saved_, is the phrase which a
man-of-war’s-man peculiarly applies to a humane and kind-hearted
officer. It also implies that the majority of quarter-deck officers are
regarded by them in such a light that they deny to them the possession
of souls. Ah! but these plebeians sometimes have a sublime vengeance
upon patricians. Imagine an outcast old sailor seriously cherishing the
purely speculative conceit that some bully in epaulets, who orders him
to and fro like a slave, is of an organization immeasurably inferior to
himself; must at last perish with the brutes, while he goes to his
immortality in heaven.
But from what has been said in this chapter, it must not be inferred
that a midshipman leads a lord’s life in a man-of-war. Far from it. He
lords it over those below him, while lorded over himself by his
superiors. It is as if with one hand a school-boy snapped his fingers
at a dog, and at the same time received upon the other the discipline
of the usher’s ferule. And though, by the American Articles of War, a
Navy Captain cannot, of his own authority, legally punish a midshipman,
otherwise than by suspension from duty (the same as with respect to the
Ward-room officers), yet this is one of those sea-statutes which the
Captain, to a certain extent, observes or disregards at his pleasure.
Many instances might be related of the petty mortifications and
official insults inflicted by some Captains upon their midshipmen; far
more severe, in one sense, than the old-fashioned punishment of sending
them to the mast-head, though not so arbitrary as sending them before
the mast, to do duty with the common sailors—a custom, in former times,
pursued by Captains in the English Navy.
Captain Claret himself had no special fondness for midshipmen. A tall,
overgrown young midshipman, about sixteen years old, having fallen
under his displeasure, he interrupted the humble apologies he was
making, by saying, “Not a word, sir! I’ll not hear a word! Mount the
netting, sir, and stand there till you are ordered to come down!”
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