Peck's Bad Boy in an airship

by George W. Peck

The next day I was at the hotel at Old Point and with hundreds of other people took a launch and went out among the battle ships. Everybody was welcome to go aboard the ships, and we visited several of them and were shown all over the vessels by the uniformed jacks.

Gee, but a battleship is like a sky scraper on land, and you can go from the roof clear down half a mile below the water line, and it is like a combination of an engine manufactory, a boiler plant, a coal yard, a wholesale grocery, a packing house, a blacksmith shop, a department store, a hotel, a powder mill, a suburban trolley line, and a bargain sale of blankets, a state fair and a military encampment, and a parade ground, a county jail and an apartment house, with rooms to let on the European plan and all of it in an iron coffin, liable to go to the bottom any minute, if the air tanks are punctured.

Gee, but I was almost afraid to be down cellar in a battleship without any life preserver, and when I went up on deck, where I could jump overboard if she began to sink, there, away on top of the whole old cook stove, were guns so big that it seemed if one got to moving around on deck it would tip the ship over. It seemed to me like boring a hole in a flat iron and crawling in, and being put in a bath tub, or like rigging up a coal stove with paddles and outriggers, and paddling out in a marsh duck shooting.

The first hour I was investigating the mechanism of a battleship and was scared silly for fear she would get ready to sink, and as I looked at the iron everywhere, which I had been taught in school would sink so quick it would make your head swim, I wondered what my nation could be thinking of to build ships of iron and depend on wind to keep them on top of the water, and I thought it would be just as safe to cover an iron railroad bridge with building paper, and launch it for a trip across the ocean; and yet all the officers and men seemed to enjoy it, and forget about the danger, for they laughed and played jokes, and put on airs, and mashed the girls who came on board as though they had made up their minds that it was only a matter of time when the ships would sink, and they seemed to congratulate themselves that when they went down with the ships a time lock would close them up hermetically so sharks and devil fish couldn’t eat the crew, and they could float around for all time and eternity safe from the resurrection as they would be buried in a safety deposit box in the vault of a trust company.

Some of the jacks played it on me. They took me and wrapped an angora goat skin around me, with the hair outside, and tied a string to my feet, and run it out of the breach of the big sixteen inch gun, and another string on my legs, and they pulled me back and forth through that forty foot gun to swab it out, and when I came out alive they laughed and were going to tie a bag of shot to my feet and let me off a plank over the side to practice on a burial at sea, but I yelled for help and a cross looking man came along and pardoned me, and told the fellows to take me to his cabin and wash the powder off my face, and hold me until he could have a talk with me. When they had scoured me with a piece of brick and some yellow laundry soap, the man came into the cabin, and the boys who had hazed me said he was Admiral Evans, and I remembered him cause once when he was in the light house service he entertained Pa and me on his light house tender, and held me on his lap at the New Orleans Mardi Gras, and I said, “Hello, Mr. Evans, don’t you remember little Hennery? I am Peck’s Bad Boy,” and he remembered me, and said, “What n’ell you doing here?” and I told him I knew what he was up against, going around the horn, and to San Francisco and Japan and the Philippines, and that I wanted to go along on his ship as a mascot, or a waiter or anything, and he said he didn’t know, but I would be a good mascot, as last trip they had a goat and a monkey for mascots, and I had a combination of both, and if he was going to make a trip to hades, or any climate hotter than the straits of Magellan, he thought I would be all right.

They Pulled Me Through That Forty-Foot Gun to Swab It Out.

He asked me what I could do and I told him there was nothing that I couldn’t do if properly encouraged, anything, from flying a flag of truce from the fighting top, to riding up in the ammunition elevator with five hundred pounds of dynamite, to acting as the propeller to a Whitehead torpedo.

We talked it over for an hour and he asked about Pa, and then he said he would think it over, and he gave me a ticket with a number on, and told me to be on the front porch of the Hotel Chamberlaine at nine o’clock the second morning after, and if a steam launch from the Connecticut landed there and gave two whistles, for me to get on board with my baggage, and report to him before the fleet sailed.

Well, say, this was quick work, and I called a launch and visited the other vessels, promising to be Johnny on the spot at the appointed hour.