There had, however, been one alteration; the gunner, Mr Minus, who had charge of the first cutter in the night action in which our hero was separated from his ship, carelessly loading his musket, had found himself minus his right hand, which, upon the musket going off as he rammed down, had gone off too. He was invalided and sent home during Jack’s absence, and another had been appointed, whose name was Tallboys. Mr Tallboys was a stout dumpy man, with red face, and still redder hands; he had red hair and red whiskers, and he had read a good deal—for Mr Tallboys considered that the gunner was the most important personage in the ship. He had once been a captain’s clerk, and having distinguished himself very much in cutting-out service, had applied for and received his warrant as a gunner. He had studied the Art of Gunnery, a part of which he understood, but the remainder was above his comprehension: he continued, however, to read it as before, thinking that by constant reading he should understand it at last. He had gone through the work from the title-page to the finis at least forty times, and had just commenced it over again. He never came on deck without the gunner’s vade-mecum in his pocket, with his hand always upon it to refer to it in a moment.
But Mr Tallboys had, as we observed before, a great idea of the importance of a gunner, and, among other qualifications, he considered it absolutely necessary that he should be a navigator. He had at least ten instances to bring forward of bloody actions, in which the captain and all the commissioned officers had been killed or wounded, and the command of the ship had devolved upon the gunner.
“Now, sir,” would he say, “if the gunner is no navigator, he is not fit to take charge of his Majesty’s ships. The boatswain and carpenter are merely practical men; but the gunner, sir, is, or ought to be, scientific. Gunnery, sir, is a science—we have our own disparts and our lines of sight—our windage and our parabolas and projectile forces—and our point blank, and our reduction of powder upon a graduated scale. Now, sir, there’s no excuse for a gunner not being a navigator; for knowing his duty as a gunner, he has the same mathematical tools to work with.” Upon this principle Mr Tallboys had added John Hamilton Moore to his library, and had advanced about as far into navigation as he had in gunnery, that is, to the threshold, where he stuck fast, with all his mathematical tools, which he did not know how to use. To do him justice, he studied for two or three hours everyday, and it was not his fault if he did not advance—but his head was confused with technical terms; he mixed all up together, and disparts, sines and cosines, parabolas, tangents, windage, seconds, lines of sight, logarithms, projectiles and traverse sailing, quadrature and Gunter’s scales, were all crowded together, in a brain which had not capacity to receive the rule of three. “Too much learning,” said Festus to the apostle, “hath made thee mad.” Mr Tallboys had not wit enough to go mad, but his learning lay like lead upon his brain: the more he read, the less he understood, at the same time that he became more satisfied with his supposed acquirements, and could not speak but in “mathematical parables.”
“I understand, Mr Easy,” said the gunner to him one day, after they had sailed for Malta, “that you have entered into the science of navigation—at your age it was high time.”
“Yes,” replied Jack, “I can raise a perpendicular, at all events, and box the compass.”
“Yes, but you have not yet arrived at the dispart of the compass.”
“Not come to that yet,” replied Jack.
“Are you aware that a ship sailing describes a parabola round the globe?”
“Not come to that yet,” replied Jack.
“And that any propelled body striking against another flies off at a tangent?”