To rancour unknown, to no passion a slave,
Nor unmanly, nor mean, nor a railer,” etc.
I do not unite with a high critical authority in considering Dibdin’s ditties as “slang songs,” for most of them breathe the very poetry of the ocean. But it is remarkable that those songs—which would lead one to think that man-of-war’s-men are the most care-free, contented, virtuous, and patriotic of mankind—were composed at a time when the English Navy was principally manned by felons and paupers, as mentioned in a former chapter. Still more, these songs are pervaded by a true Mohammedan sensualism; a reckless acquiescence in fate, and an implicit, unquestioning, dog-like devotion to whoever may be lord and master. Dibdin was a man of genius; but no wonder Dibdin was a government pensioner at £200 per annum.
But notwithstanding the iniquities of a man-of-war, men are to be found in them, at times, so used to a hard life; so drilled and disciplined to servitude, that, with an incomprehensible philosophy, they seem cheerfully to resign themselves to their fate. They have plenty to eat; spirits to drink; clothing to keep them warm; a hammock to sleep in; tobacco to chew; a doctor to medicine them; a parson to pray for them; and, to a penniless castaway, must not all this seem as a luxurious Bill of Fare?
There was on board of the Neversink a fore-top-man by the name of Landless, who, though his back was cross-barred, and plaided with the ineffaceable scars of all the floggings accumulated by a reckless tar during a ten years’ service in the Navy, yet he perpetually wore a hilarious face, and at joke and repartee was a very Joe Miller.
That man, though a sea-vagabond, was not created in vain. He enjoyed life with the zest of everlasting adolescence; and, though cribbed in an oaken prison, with the turnkey sentries all round him, yet he paced the gun-deck as if it were broad as a prairie, and diversified in landscape as the hills and valleys of the Tyrol. Nothing ever disconcerted him; nothing could transmute his laugh into anything like a sigh. Those glandular secretions, which in other captives sometimes go to the formation of tears, in him were expectorated from the mouth, tinged with the golden juice of a weed, wherewith he solaced and comforted his ignominious days.
“Rum and tobacco!” said Landless, “what more does a sailor want?”
His favourite song was “Dibdin’s True English Sailor,” beginning,
“Jack dances and sings, and is always content,
In his vows to his lass he’ll ne’er fail her;
His anchor’s atrip when his money’s all spent,
And this is the life of a sailor.”
But poor Landless danced quite as often at the gangway, under the lash, as in the sailor dance-houses ashore.
Another of his songs, also set to the significant tune of The King, God bless him! mustered the following lines among many similar ones: