Rattlin the Reefer

by Edward Howard

So I flung the water-jug at his head.

We were just proceeding to handicuffs, when the master-at-arms, hearing the riot, opened the door. We then cooled upon it, and a truce ensued. Explanations followed the truce, and an apology, on his part, the explanation; for which apology I very gladly gave him the pencil-case, that I had promised to keep as long as I lived, and a heartache at the same time.

The poor fellow had given the faithful Jemima this mutable love-gift three days before it came into my possession, on which occasion they had broken a crooked sixpence together. I moralised upon this, and came to the conclusion, that, whatever a tailor might be, a sailor is no match for a tailor’s daughter, born and bred up at Chatham.

Now, I have nothing wherewith to amuse the reader about the mischievous tricks that were played upon me in my entrance into my naval life. The clews of my hammock were not reefed. I was not lowered down by the head into a bucket of cold water, nor sent anywhere with a foolish message by a greater fool than myself. The exemptions from these usual persecutions I attribute to my robust and well-grown frame; my disposition so easily evinced to do battle on the first occasion that offered itself; and, lastly, my well-stocked purse, and the evident consideration shown to me by the captain and the first-lieutenant.

As I write as much for the instruction of my readers as for their amusement, I wish to impress upon them, if they are themselves, or if they know any that are, going to enter into the navy, the necessity, in the first instance, of showing or recommending a proper spirit. Never let the débutant regard how young or how feeble he may be—he must make head against the first insult—he must avenge the first hoax. No doubt he will be worsted, and get a good beating; but that one will save him from many hundreds hereafter, and, perhaps, the necessity of fighting a mortal duel. Your certain defeat will be forgotten in the admiration of the spirit that provoked the contest. And remember, that the person who hoaxes you is always in the wrong, and it depends only upon yourself to heap that ridicule upon him that was intended for your own head; to say nothing of the odium that must attach to him for the cruelty, the cowardice, and the meanness of fighting with a lad weaker than himself. This I will enforce by a plain fact that happened to myself. A tall, consequential, thirty-years-old master’s mate, threatened to beat me, after the manner that oldsters are accustomed to beat youngsters. I told him, that if he struck me, I would strike again as long as I had strength to stand, or power to lift my hand. He laughed, and struck me. I retaliated; it is true that I got a sound thrashing; but it was my first and last, and my tyrant got both his eyes well blackened, his cheek swollen—and was altogether so much defaced, that he was forced to hide himself in the sick-list for a fortnight. The story could not be told well for him, but it told for me gloriously; indeed, he felt so much annoyed by the whole affair, that he went and asked leave to go and mess with the gunner, fairly stating to the captain that he could not run the risk of keeping order—for he was our caterer—if he had to fight a battle every time he had to enforce it.

But I cannot too much caution youngsters against having recourse, in their self-defence, to deadly weapons. I am sorry to say, it was too common when I was in the navy. It is un-English and assassin-like. It rarely keeps off the tyrant; the knife, the dirk, or whatever else may be the instrument, is almost invariably forced from the young bravo’s hand, and the thrashing that he afterwards gets is pitiless, and the would-be stabber finds no voice lifted in his favour. He also gains the stigma of cowardice, and the bad reputation of being malignant and revengeful. Indeed, so utterly futile is the drawing of murderous instruments in little affrays of this sort, that, though I have known them displayed hundreds of times, yet I never knew a single wound to have been inflicted—though many a heavy beating has followed the atrocious display. By all means, let my young friends avoid it.

On the day before we sailed from Sheerness, the captain had an order conveyed to the first-lieutenant to send me away on duty immediately, for two or three hours. I was bundled into the pinnace with old canvas, old ropes, and old blocks, condemned stores to the dock-yard, and, as I approached the landing-place appropriated for the use of admirals in posse, I saw embark from the stairs, exclusively set apart for admirals and post-captains in esse, my captain and the port-admiral in the admiral’s barge, and seated between these two awful personages, there sat a civilian, smiling in all the rotundity and fat of a very pleasant countenance, and very plain clothes, and forming a striking contrast to the grim complacency, and the ironbound civility, of the two men in uniform.

The boat’s crew were so much struck with this apparent anomaly—for to them, anything in the civilian’s garb to come near an officer, and that officer a naval one, was hardly less than portentous, and argued the said civilian to be something belonging to the genus homo extraordinary—and the fat specimen in the boat with the port-admiral, they thought, was one of the lords of the Admiralty, or even Mr Croker himself—the notion of whose dimly-understood attributes was, with them, of a truly magnificent nature. Whoever this person was, he was carefully assisted up the side of our ship, and remained on board for about an hour, whilst we were burning with curiosity and eagerness to be on board to satisfy it, and forced to do our best to allay this tantalising passion, by hauling along tallied bights of rope, and rousing old hawsers out, and new hawsers into the boat—a more pleasant employment may be easily imagined for a raw, cold, misty day in winter.

I regarded all these operations very sapiently, knowing as yet nothing of the uses, or even of the names, of the different stores that I was delivering and receiving. The boatswain was with me, of course: but notwithstanding that I had positive orders not to let the men stray away from the duty they were performing—as this official told me, after we had done almost everything that we had come on shore to perform, that he must borrow two of the men to go up with him to the storekeeper’s private house, to look out for some strong fine white line with which to bowse up the best bower anchor to the spanker-boom-end, when the ship should happen to be too much down by the stern, I could not refuse to disobey my orders upon a contingency so urgent. And there he left me, for about two hours, shivering in the boat; and, at length, he and the men came down, with very little white line in exchange for his not very white tie; and truly, they had been bowsing-up something; for Mr Lushby, the respectable boatswain, told me, with very great condescension, that he was a real officer, whilst I was nothing but a living walking-stick, for the captain to swear at when he was in a bad humour; and that he had no doubt but that I should get mast-headed when I got on board, for allowing those two men, who were catching crabs, to get so drunk.

Similar tricks to this, every young gentleman entering the service must expect—tricks that partake as much of the nature of malice as of fun. Now, in the few days that I had been in the service, I very well understood that the care of the men, as respected their behaviour and sobriety, devolved on me, the delivering of old, and the drawing of new stores, on the boatswain; yet, for the conduct of those men that he took from under my eye, I felt that, in justice, he was answerable. I therefore made no reply to the vauntings and railings of Mr Lushby, but had determined how to act. The boat came alongside. There was nobody on board but the officer of the watch, and Mr Lushby tumbled up the side and down the waist in double-quick time, sending the chief boatswain’s mate and the yeoman of the stores to act as his deputy. He certainly did his duty in that respect, as two sober deputies are worth more than is a drunken principal.