“Commodore Camoens, White-Jacket.—But bear a hand there; we must rig out that stun’-sail boom—the wind is shifting.”
From our lofty perch, of a moonlight night, the frigate itself was a glorious sight. She was going large before the wind, her stun’-sails set on both sides, so that the canvas on the main-mast and fore-mast presented the appearance of majestic, tapering pyramids, more than a hundred feet broad at the base, and terminating in the clouds with the light copestone of the royals. That immense area of snow-white canvas sliding along the sea was indeed a magnificent spectacle. The three shrouded masts looked like the apparitions of three gigantic Turkish Emirs striding over the ocean.
Nor, at times, was the sound of music wanting, to augment the poetry of the scene. The whole band would be assembled on the poop, regaling the officers, and incidentally ourselves, with their fine old airs. To these, some of us would occasionally dance in the top, which was almost as large as an ordinary sized parlour. When the instrumental melody of the band was not to be had, our nightingales mustered their voices, and gave us a song.
Upon these occasions Jack Chase was often called out, and regaled us, in his own free and noble style, with the “Spanish Ladies”—a favourite thing with British man-of-war’s-men—and many other salt-sea ballads and ditties, including,
“Sir Patrick Spens was the best sailor
That ever sailed the sea.”
also,
“And three times around spun our gallant ship;
Three times around spun she;
Three times around spun our gallant ship,
And she went to the bottom of the sea—
The sea, the sea, the sea,
And she went to the bottom of the sea!”
These songs would be varied by sundry yarns and twisters of the top-men. And it was at these times that I always endeavoured to draw out the oldest Tritons into narratives of the war-service they had seen. There were but few of them, it is true, who had been in action; but that only made their narratives the more valuable.
There was an old negro, who went by the name of Tawney, a sheet-anchor-man, whom we often invited into our top of tranquil nights, to hear him discourse. He was a staid and sober seaman, very intelligent, with a fine, frank bearing, one of the best men in the ship, and held in high estimation by every one.
It seems that, during the last war between England and America, he had, with several others, been “impressed” upon the high seas, out of a New England merchantman. The ship that impressed him was an English frigate, the Macedonian, afterward taken by the Neversink, the ship in which we were sailing.