- end_line
- 10980
- extracted_at
- 2026-01-30T20:48:36.274Z
- extracted_by
- structure-extraction-lambda
- start_line
- 10926
- text
- The _main-mast-man_ of the Neversink was a very aged seaman, who well
deserved his comfortable berth. He had seen more than half a century of
the most active service, and, through all, had proved himself a good
and faithful man. He furnished one of the very rare examples of a
sailor in a green old age; for, with most sailors, old age comes in
youth, and Hardship and Vice carry them on an early bier to the grave.
As in the evening of life, and at the close of the day, old Abraham sat
at the door of his tent, biding his time to die, so sits our old
mast-man on the _coat of the mast_, glancing round him with patriarchal
benignity. And that mild expression of his sets off very strangely a
face that has been burned almost black by the torrid suns that shone
fifty years ago—a face that is seamed with three sabre cuts. You would
almost think this old mast-man had been blown out of Vesuvius, to look
alone at his scarred, blackened forehead, chin, and cheeks. But gaze
down into his eye, and though all the snows of Time have drifted higher
and higher upon his brow, yet deep down in that eye you behold an
infantile, sinless look, the same that answered the glance of this old
man’s mother when first she cried for the babe to be laid by her side.
That look is the fadeless, ever infantile immortality within.
The Lord Nelsons of the sea, though but Barons in the state, yet
oftentimes prove more potent than their royal masters; and at such
scenes as Trafalgar—dethroning this Emperor and reinstating that—enact
on the ocean the proud part of mighty Richard Neville, the king-making
Earl of the land. And as Richard Neville entrenched himself in his
moated old man-of-war castle of Warwick, which, underground, was
traversed with vaults, hewn out of the solid rock, and intricate as the
wards of the old keys of Calais surrendered to Edward III.; even so do
these King-Commodores house themselves in their water-rimmed,
cannon-sentried frigates, oaken dug, deck under deck, as cell under
cell. And as the old Middle-Age warders of Warwick, every night at
curfew, patrolled the battlements, and dove down into the vaults to see
that all lights were extinguished, even so do the master-at-arms and
ship’s corporals of a frigate perambulate all the decks of a
man-of-war, blowing out all tapers but those burning in the legalized
battle-lanterns. Yea, in these things, so potent is the authority of
these sea-wardens, that, though almost the lowest subalterns in the
ship, yet should they find the Senior Lieutenant himself sitting up
late in his state-room, reading Bowditch’s Navigator, or D’Anton “_On
Gunpowder and Fire-arms_,” they would infallibly blow the light out
under his very nose; nor durst that Grand-Vizier resent the indignity.
But, unwittingly, I have ennobled, by grand historical comparisons,
this prying, pettifogging, Irish-informer of a master-at-arms.
You have seen some slim, slip-shod housekeeper, at midnight ferreting
over a rambling old house in the country, startling at fancied witches
and ghosts, yet intent on seeing every door bolted, every smouldering
ember in the fireplaces smothered, every loitering domestic abed, and
every light made dark. This is the master-at-arms taking his
night-rounds in a frigate.
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