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- 11577
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- 2026-01-30T20:48:36.274Z
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- 11514
- text
- invests the Captain with so much judicial and administrative authority
over him—in most cases entirely discretionary—not one solitary clause
is to be found which in any way provides means for a seaman deeming
himself aggrieved to obtain redress. Indeed, both the written and
unwritten laws of the American Navy are as destitute of individual
guarantees to the mass of seamen as the Statute Book of the despotic
Empire of Russia.
Who put this great gulf between the American Captain and the American
sailor? Or is the Captain a creature of like passions with ourselves?
Or is he an infallible archangel, incapable of the shadow of error? Or
has a sailor no mark of humanity, no attribute of manhood, that, bound
hand and foot, he is cast into an American frigate shorn of all rights
and defences, while the notorious lawlessness of the Commander has
passed into a proverb, familiar to man-of-war’s-men, _the law was not
made for the Captain!_ Indeed, he may almost be said to put off the
citizen when he touches his quarter-deck; and, almost exempt from the
law of the land himself, he comes down upon others with a judicial
severity unknown on the national soil. With the Articles of War in one
hand, and the cat-o’-nine-tails in the other, he stands an undignified
parody upon Mohammed enforcing Moslemism with the sword and the Koran.
The concluding sections of the Articles of War treat of the naval
courts-martial before which officers are tried for serious offences as
well as the seamen. The oath administered to members of these
courts—which sometimes sit upon matters of life and death—explicitly
enjoins that the members shall not “at any time divulge the vote or
opinion of any particular member of the court, unless required so to do
before a court of justice in due course of law.”
Here, then, is a Council of Ten and a Star Chamber indeed! Remember,
also, that though the sailor is sometimes tried for his life before a
tribunal like this, in no case do his fellow-sailors, his peers, form
part of the court. Yet that a man should be tried by his peers is the
fundamental principle of all civilised jurisprudence. And not only
tried by his peers, but his peers must be unanimous to render a
verdict; whereas, in a court-martial, the concurrence of a majority of
conventional and social superiors is all that is requisite.
In the English Navy, it is said, they had a law which authorised the
sailor to appeal, if he chose, from the decision of the Captain—even in
a comparatively trivial case—to the higher tribunal of a court-martial.
It was an English seaman who related this to me. When I said that such
a law must be a fatal clog to the exercise of the penal power in the
Captain, he, in substance, told me the following story.
A top-man guilty of drunkenness being sent to the gratings, and the
scourge about to be inflicted, he turned round and demanded a
court-martial. The Captain smiled, and ordered him to be taken down and
put into the “brig,” There he was kept in irons some weeks, when,
despairing of being liberated, he offered to compromise at two dozen
lashes. “Sick of your bargain, then, are you?” said the Captain. “No,
no! a court-martial you demanded, and a court-martial you shall have!”
Being at last tried before the bar of quarter-deck officers, he was
condemned to two hundred lashes. What for? for his having been drunk?
No! for his having had the insolence to appeal from an authority, in
maintaining which the men who tried and condemned him had so strong a
sympathetic interest.
Whether this story be wholly true or not, or whether the particular law
involved prevails, or ever did prevail, in the English Navy, the thing,
nevertheless, illustrates the ideas that man-of-war’s-men themselves
have touching the tribunals in question.
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- Chunk 2