White Jacket; Or, The World on a Man-of-War

by Herman Melville

  CHAPTER XCI.

  SMOKING-CLUB IN A MAN-OF-WAR, WITH SCENES ON THE GUN-DECK DRAWING NEARHOME.

  There is a fable about a painter moved by Jove to the painting of thehead of Medusa. Though the picture was true to the life, yet the poorartist sickened at the sight of what his forced pencil had drawn. Thus,borne through my task toward the end, my own soul now sinks at what Imyself have portrayed. But let us forget past chapters, if we may,while we paint less repugnant things.

  Metropolitan gentlemen have their club; provincial gossipers theirnews-room; village quidnuncs their barber's shop; the Chinese theiropium-houses; American Indians their council-fire; and even cannibalstheir _Noojona_, or Talk-Stone, where they assemble at times to discussthe affairs of the day. Nor is there any government, however despotic,that ventures to deny to the least of its subjects the privilege of asociable chat. Not the Thirty Tyrants even--the clubbed post-captainsof old Athens--could stop the wagging tongues at the street-corners.For chat man must; and by our immortal Bill of Rights, that guaranteesto us liberty of speech, chat we Yankees will, whether on board afrigate, or on board our own terra-firma plantations.

  In men-of-war, the Galley, or Cookery, on the gun-deck, is the grandcentre of gossip and news among the sailors. Here crowds assemble tochat away the half-hour elapsing after every meal. The reason why thisplace and these hours are selected rather than others is this: in theneighbourhood of the galley alone, and only after meals, is theman-of-war's-man permitted to regale himself with a smoke.

  A sumptuary edict, truly, that deprived White-Jacket, for one, of aluxury to which he had long been attached. For how can the mysticalmotives, the capricious impulses of a luxurious smoker go and come atthe beck of a Commodore's command? No! when I smoke, be it because ofmy sovereign good pleasure I choose so to do, though at so unseasonablean hour that I send round the town for a brasier of coals. What! smokeby a sun-dial? Smoke on compulsion? Make a trade, a business, a vilerecurring calling of smoking? And, perhaps, when those sedative fumeshave steeped you in the grandest of reveries, and, circle over circle,solemnly rises some immeasurable dome in your soul--far away, swellingand heaving into the vapour you raise--as if from one Mozart's grandestmarches of a temple were rising, like Venus from the sea--at such atime, to have your whole Parthenon tumbled about your ears by the knellof the ship's bell announcing the expiration of the half-hour forsmoking! Whip me, ye Furies! toast me in saltpetre! smite me, somethunderbolt! 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 theluxury rather than enslave it to a time and a place. Herein did I notright, Ancient and Honourable Old Guard of Smokers all round the world?

  But there were others of the crew not so fastidious as myself. Afterevery meal, they hied to the galley and solaced their souls with awhiff.

  Now a bunch of cigars, all banded together, is a type and a symbol ofthe brotherly love between smokers. Likewise, for the time, in acommunity of pipes is a community of hearts! Nor was it an ill thingfor the Indian Sachems to circulate their calumet tobacco-bowl--even asour own forefathers circulated their punch-bowl--in token of peace,charity, and good-will, friendly feelings, and sympathising souls. Andthis it was that made the gossipers of the galley so loving a club, solong as the vapoury bond united them.

  It was a pleasant sight to behold them. Grouped in the recesses betweenthe guns, they chatted and laughed like rows of convivialists in theboxes of some vast dining-saloon. Take a Flemish kitchen full of goodfellows from Teniers; add a fireside group from Wilkie; throw in anaval sketch from Cruickshank; and then stick a short pipe into everymother's son's mouth, and you have the smoking scene at the galley ofthe Neversink.

  Not a few were politicians; and, as there were some thoughts of a warwith England at the time, their discussions waxed warm.

  "I tell you what it is, _shippies!_" cried the old captain of gun No. 1on the forecastle, "if that 'ere President of ourn don't luff up intothe wind, by the Battle of the Nile! he'll be getting us into a grandfleet engagement afore the Yankee nation has rammed home hercartridges--let alone blowing the match!"

  "Who talks of luffing?" roared a roystering fore-top-man. "Keep ourYankee nation large before the wind, say I, till you come plump on theenemy's bows, and then board him in the smoke," and with that, therecame 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.

  "But they say he's a cold-water customer, Bill," cried another; "andsometimes o' nights I somehow has a presentation that he's goin' tostop our grog."

  "D'ye hear there, fore and aft!" roared the boatswain's mate at thegangway, "all hands tumble up, and 'bout ship!"

  "That's the talk!" cried the captain of gun No. 1, as, in obedience tothe summons, all hands dropped their pipes and crowded toward theladders, "and that's what the President must do--go in stays, my lads,and put the Yankee nation on the other tack."

  But these political discussions by no means supplied the staple ofconversation for the gossiping smokers of the galley. The interioraffairs of the frigate itself formed their principal theme. Rumoursabout the private life of the Commodore in his cabin; about theCaptain, in his; about the various officers in the ward-room; about the_reefers_ in the steerage, and their madcap frolickings, and about athousand other matters touching the crew themselves; all these--formingthe eternally shifting, domestic by-play of a man-of-war--provedinexhaustible topics for our quidnuncs.

  The animation of these scenes was very much heightened as we drewnearer and nearer our port; it rose to a climax when the frigate wasreported to be only twenty-four hours' sail from the land. What theyshould do when they landed; how they should invest their wages; whatthey should eat; what they should drink; and what lass they shouldmarry--these were the topics which absorbed them.

  "Sink the sea!" cried a forecastle man. "Once more ashore, and you'llnever again catch old Boombolt afloat. I mean to settle down in asail-loft."

  "Cable-tier pinchers blister all tarpaulin hats!" cried a youngafter-guard's-man; "I mean to go back to the counter."

  "Shipmates! take me by the arms, and swab up the lee-scuppers with me,but I mean to steer a clam-cart before I go again to a ship's wheel.Let the Navy go by the board--to sea again, I won't!"

  "Start my soul-bolts, maties, if any more Blue Peters and sailingsignals fly at my fore!" cried the Captain of the Head. "My wages willbuy a wheelbarrow, if nothing more."

  "I have taken my last dose of salts," said the Captain of the Waist,"and after this mean to stick to fresh water. Ay, maties, ten of usWaisters mean to club together and buy a _serving-mallet boat_, d'yesee; and if ever we drown, it will be in the 'raging canal!' Blast thesea, shipmates! say I."

  "Profane not the holy element!" said Lemsford, the poet of thegun-deck, leaning over a cannon. "Know ye not, man-of-war's-men! thatby the Parthian magi the ocean was held sacred? Did not Tiridates, theEastern monarch, take an immense land circuit to avoid desecrating theMediterranean, in order to reach his imperial master, Nero, and dohomage for his crown?"

  "What lingo is that?" cried the Captain of the Waist.

  "Who's Commodore Tiddery-eye?" cried the forecastle-man.

  "Hear me out," resumed Lemsford. "Like Tiridates, I venerate the sea,and venerate it so highly, shipmates, that evermore I shall abstainfrom crossing it. In _that_ sense, Captain of the Waist, I echo yourcry."

  It was, indeed, a remarkable fact, that nine men out of every ten ofthe Neversink's crew had formed some plan or other to keep themselvesashore for life, or, at least, on fresh water, after the expiration ofthe present cruise. With all the experiences of that cruise accumulatedin one intense recollection of a moment; with the smell of tar in theirnostrils; out of sight of land; with a stout ship under foot, andsnuf
fing the ocean air; with all the things of the sea surroundingthem; in their cool, sober moments of reflection; in the silence andsolitude of the deep, during the long night-watches, when all theirholy home associations were thronging round their hearts; in thespontaneous piety and devotion of the last hours of so long a voyage;in the fullness and the frankness of their souls; when there was naughtto jar the well-poised equilibrium of their judgment--under all thesecircumstances, at least nine tenths of a crew of five hundredman-of-war's-men resolved for ever to turn their backs on the sea. Butdo men ever hate the thing they love? Do men forswear the hearth andthe homestead? What, then, must the Navy be?

  But, alas for the man-of-war's-man, who, though he may take a Hannibaloath against the service; yet, cruise after cruise, and afterforswearing it again and again, he is driven back to the spirit-tub andthe gun-deck by his old hereditary foe, the ever-devilish god of grog.

  On this point, let some of the crew of the Neversink be called to thestand.

  You, Captain of the Waist! and you, seamen of the fore-top! and you,after-guard's-men and others! how came you here at the guns of theNorth Carolina, after registering your solemn vows at the galley of theNeversink?

  They all hang their heads. I know the cause; poor fellows! perjureyourselves not again; swear not at all hereafter.

  Ay, these very tars--the foremost in denouncing the Navy; who had boundthemselves by the most tremendous oaths--these very men, not three daysafter getting ashore, were rolling round the streets in pennilessdrunkenness; and next day many of them were to be found on board of the_guardo_ or receiving-ship. Thus, in part, is the Navy manned.

  But what was still more surprising, and tended to impart a new andstrange insight into the character of sailors, and overthrow somelong-established ideas concerning them as a class, was this: numbers ofmen who, during the cruise, had passed for exceedingly prudent, nay,parsimonious persons, who would even refuse you a patch, or a needlefulof thread, and, from their stinginess, procured the name of_Ravelings_--no sooner were these men fairly adrift in harbour, andunder the influence of frequent quaffings, than theirthree-years'-earned wages flew right and left; they summoned wholeboarding-houses of sailors to the bar, and treated them over and overagain. Fine fellows! generous-hearted tars! Seeing this sight, Ithought to myself, Well, these generous-hearted tars on shore were thegreatest curmudgeons afloat! it's the bottle that's generous, not they!Yet the popular conceit concerning a sailor is derived from hisbehaviour ashore; whereas, ashore he is no longer a sailor, but alandsman for the time. A man-of-war's-man is only a man-of-war's-man atsea; and the sea is the place to learn what he is. But we have seenthat a man-of-war is but this old-fashioned world of ours afloat, fullof all manner of characters--full of strange contradictions; and thoughboasting some fine fellows here and there, yet, upon the whole, chargedto the combings of her hatchways with the spirit of Belial and allunrighteousness.