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- 4370
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- 2026-01-30T20:48:36.270Z
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- 4305
- text
- In time of peril, like the needle to the loadstone, obedience,
irrespective of rank, generally flies to him who is best fitted to
command. The truth of this seemed evinced in the case of Mad Jack,
during the gale, and especially at that perilous moment when he
countermanded the Captain’s order at the helm. But every seaman knew,
at the time, that the Captain’s order was an unwise one in the extreme;
perhaps worse than unwise.
These two orders given, by the Captain and his Lieutenant, exactly
contrasted their characters. By putting the helm _hard up_, the Captain
was for _scudding_; that is, for flying away from the gale. Whereas,
Mad Jack was for running the ship into its teeth. It is needless to say
that, in almost all cases of similar hard squalls and gales, the latter
step, though attended with more appalling appearances is, in reality,
the safer of the two, and the most generally adopted.
Scudding makes you a slave to the blast, which drives you headlong
before it; but _running up into the wind’s eye_ enables you, in a
degree, to hold it at bay. Scudding exposes to the gale your stern, the
weakest part of your hull; the contrary course presents to it your
bows, your strongest part. As with ships, so with men; he who turns his
back to his foe gives him an advantage. Whereas, our ribbed chests,
like the ribbed bows of a frigate, are as bulkheads to dam off an
onset.
That night, off the pitch of the Cape, Captain Claret was hurried forth
from his disguises, and, at a manhood-testing conjuncture, appeared in
his true colours. A thing which every man in the ship had long
suspected that night was proved true. Hitherto, in going about the
ship, and casting his glances among the men, the peculiarly lustreless
repose of the Captain’s eye—his slow, even, unnecessarily methodical
step, and the forced firmness of his whole demeanour—though, to a
casual observer, expressive of the consciousness of command and a
desire to strike subjection among the crew—all this, to some minds, had
only been deemed indications of the fact that Captain Claret, while
carefully shunning positive excesses, continually kept himself in an
uncertain equilibrio between soberness and its reverse; which
equilibrio might be destroyed by the first sharp vicissitude of events.
And though this is only a surmise, nevertheless, as having some
knowledge of brandy and mankind, White-Jacket will venture to state
that, had Captain Claret been an out-and-out temperance man, he would
never have given that most imprudent order to _hard up_ the helm. He
would either have held his peace, and stayed in his cabin, like his
gracious majesty the Commodore, or else have anticipated Mad Jack’s
order, and thundered forth “Hard down the helm!”
To show how little real sway at times have the severest restrictive
laws, and how spontaneous is the instinct of discretion in some minds,
it must here be added, that though Mad Jack, under a hot impulse, had
countermanded an order of his superior officer before his very face,
yet that severe Article of War, to which he thus rendered himself
obnoxious, was never enforced against him. Nor, so far as any of the
crew ever knew, did the Captain even venture to reprimand him for his
temerity.
It has been said that Mad Jack himself was a lover of strong drink. So
he was. But here we only see the virtue of being placed in a station
constantly demanding a cool head and steady nerves, and the misfortune
of filling a post that does _not_ at all times demand these qualities.
So exact and methodical in most things was the discipline of the
frigate, that, to a certain extent, Captain Claret was exempted from
personal interposition in many of its current events, and thereby,
perhaps, was he lulled into security, under the enticing lee of his
decanter.
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