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- 14857
- extracted_at
- 2026-01-30T20:48:36.278Z
- extracted_by
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- text
- In men-of-war, the Galley, or Cookery, on the gun-deck, is the grand
centre of gossip and news among the sailors. Here crowds assemble to
chat away the half-hour elapsing after every meal. The reason why this
place and these hours are selected rather than others is this: in the
neighbourhood of the galley alone, and only after meals, is the
man-of-war’s-man permitted to regale himself with a smoke.
A sumptuary edict, truly, that deprived White-Jacket, for one, of a
luxury to which he had long been attached. For how can the mystical
motives, the capricious impulses of a luxurious smoker go and come at
the beck of a Commodore’s command? No! when I smoke, be it because of
my sovereign good pleasure I choose so to do, though at so unseasonable
an hour that I send round the town for a brasier of coals. What! smoke
by a sun-dial? Smoke on compulsion? Make a trade, a business, a vile
recurring calling of smoking? And, perhaps, when those sedative fumes
have steeped you in the grandest of reveries, and, circle over circle,
solemnly rises some immeasurable dome in your soul—far away, swelling
and heaving into the vapour you raise—as if from one Mozart’s grandest
marches of a temple were rising, like Venus from the sea—at such a
time, to have your whole Parthenon tumbled about your ears by the knell
of the ship’s bell announcing the expiration of the half-hour for
smoking! Whip me, ye Furies! toast me in saltpetre! smite me, some
thunderbolt! charge upon me, endless squadrons of Mamalukes! devour me,
Feejees! but preserve me from a tyranny like this!
No! though I smoked like an Indian summer ere I entered the Neversink,
so abhorrent was this sumptuary law that I altogether abandoned the
luxury rather than enslave it to a time and a place. Herein did I not
right, Ancient and Honourable Old Guard of Smokers all round the world?
But there were others of the crew not so fastidious as myself. After
every meal, they hied to the galley and solaced their souls with a
whiff.
Now a bunch of cigars, all banded together, is a type and a symbol of
the brotherly love between smokers. Likewise, for the time, in a
community of pipes is a community of hearts! Nor was it an ill thing
for the Indian Sachems to circulate their calumet tobacco-bowl—even as
our own forefathers circulated their punch-bowl—in token of peace,
charity, and good-will, friendly feelings, and sympathising souls. And
this it was that made the gossipers of the galley so loving a club, so
long as the vapoury bond united them.
It was a pleasant sight to behold them. Grouped in the recesses between
the guns, they chatted and laughed like rows of convivialists in the
boxes of some vast dining-saloon. Take a Flemish kitchen full of good
fellows from Teniers; add a fireside group from Wilkie; throw in a
naval sketch from Cruickshank; and then stick a short pipe into every
mother’s son’s mouth, and you have the smoking scene at the galley of
the Neversink.
Not a few were politicians; and, as there were some thoughts of a war
with England at the time, their discussions waxed warm.
“I tell you what it is, _shippies!_” cried the old captain of gun No. 1
on the forecastle, “if that ’ere President of ourn don’t luff up into
the wind, by the Battle of the Nile! he’ll be getting us into a grand
fleet engagement afore the Yankee nation has rammed home her
cartridges—let alone blowing the match!”
“Who talks of luffing?” roared a roystering fore-top-man. “Keep our
Yankee nation large before the wind, say I, till you come plump on the
enemy’s bows, and then board him in the smoke,” and with that, there
came forth a mighty blast from his pipe.
“Who says the old man at the helm of the Yankee nation can’t steer his
_trick_ as well as George Washington himself?” cried a
sheet-anchor-man.
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