“Well, Jack, we will see about it,” at last cried the Commodore, advancing. “I think we must let you go.”
“To your duty, captain of the main-top!” said the Captain, rather stiffly. He wished to neutralise somewhat the effect of the Commodore’s condescension. Besides, he had much rather the Commodore had been in his cabin. His presence, for the time, affected his own supremacy in his ship. But Jack was nowise cast down by the Captain’s coldness; he felt safe enough; so he proceeded to offer his acknowledgments.
“‘Kind gentlemen,’” he sighed, “‘your pains are registered where every day I turn the leaf to read,’—Macbeth, valiant Commodore and Captain!—what the Thane says to the noble lords, Ross and Angus.”
And long and lingeringly bowing to the two noble officers, Jack backed away from their presence, still shading his eyes with the broad rim of his hat.
“Jack Chase for ever!” cried his shipmates, as he carried the grateful news of liberty to them on the forecastle. “Who can talk to Commodores like our matchless Jack!”
CHAPTER LII.
SOMETHING CONCERNING MIDSHIPMEN.
It was the next morning after matchless Jack’s interview with the Commodore and Captain, that a little incident occurred, soon forgotten by the crew at large, but long remembered by the few seamen who were in the habit of closely scrutinising every-day proceedings. Upon the face of it, it was but a common event—at least in a man-of-war—the flogging of a man at the gangway. But the under-current of circumstances in the case were of a nature that magnified this particular flogging into a matter of no small importance. The story itself cannot here be related; it would not well bear recital: enough that the person flogged was a middle-aged man of the Waist—a forlorn, broken-down, miserable object, truly; one of those wretched landsmen sometimes driven into the Navy by their unfitness for all things else, even as others are driven into the workhouse. He was flogged at the complaint of a midshipman; and hereby hangs the drift of the thing. For though this waister was so ignoble a mortal, yet his being scourged on this one occasion indirectly proceeded from the mere wanton spite and unscrupulousness of the midshipman in question—a youth, who was apt to indulge at times in undignified familiarities with some of the men, who, sooner or later, almost always suffered from his capricious preferences.
But the leading principle that was involved in this affair is far too mischievous to be lightly dismissed.
In most cases, it would seem to be a cardinal principle with a Navy Captain that his subordinates are disintegrated parts of himself, detached from the main body on special service, and that the order of the minutest midshipman must be as deferentially obeyed by the seamen as if proceeding from the Commodore on the poop. This principle was once emphasised in a remarkable manner by the valiant and handsome Sir Peter Parker, upon whose death, on a national arson expedition on the shores of Chesapeake Bay, in 1812 or 1813, Lord Byron wrote his well-known stanzas. “By the god of war!” said Sir Peter to his sailors, “I’ll make you touch your hat to a midshipman’s coat, if it’s only hung on a broomstick to dry!”
That the king, in the eye of the law, can do no wrong, is the well-known fiction of despotic states; but it has remained for the navies of Constitutional Monarchies and Republics to magnify this fiction, by indirectly extending it to all the quarter-deck subordinates of an armed ship’s chief magistrate. And though judicially unrecognised, and unacknowledged by the officers themselves, yet this is the principle that pervades the fleet; this is the principle that is every hour acted upon, and to sustain which, thousands of seamen have been flogged at the gangway.