“If he did not think the future would fully avenge itself of the past—if history would not do ample justice to the mighty dead—if certain names would not be consigned to everlasting infamy for chaining a hero to a rock; and whether HIS country, the land of freemen, would ever have disgraced itself, by such an act of barbarism and vengeance?”
The captain heard me very calmly; then deliberately helping himself to some tobacco, he replied,—
“Harkee, Sir John. At Stunin’tun, when we catch a ferocious critter’, we always put it in a cage. I’m no great mathematician, as I’ve often told you; if my dog bites me once, I kick him—twice, I beat him—thrice, I chain him.”
Alas! there are minds so unfortunately constituted, that they have no sympathies with the sublime. All their tendencies are direct and common-sense like. To such men, Napoleon appears little better than one who lived among his fellows more in the character of a tiger than in that of a man. They condemn him because he could not reduce his own sense of the attributes of greatness to the level of their home-bred morality. Among this number, it would now seem, was to be classed Captain Noah Poke.
A wish to relate the manner in which Dr. Reasono and his companions fell into human hands, has caused me to overlook one or two matters of lighter moment, that should not, in justice to myself, however, be entirely omitted.
When we had been at sea two days, a very agreeable surprise for the monikin party was prepared and executed. I had caused a certain number of jackets and trousers to be made of the skins of different animals, such as dogs, cats, sheep, tigers, leopards, hogs, etc., etc., with the proper accompaniments of snouts, hoofs, and claws; and, when the ladies came on deck, after breakfast, their eyes were no longer offended by our rude innovations upon nature, but the whole crew were flying about the rigging, like so many animals of the different species named. Noah and myself appeared in the characters of sea-lions, the former having intimated that he understood the nature of that beast better than any other. Of course, this delicate attention was properly appreciated, and handsomely acknowledged.
I had taken the precaution to order imitation-skins to be made of cotton, which were worn in the low latitudes; and, as we got near the Falkland Islands, the real skins were resumed, with promptitude, and I might add, with pleasure.
Noah had, at first, raised some strong objections to the scheme, saying that he should not feel safe in a ship manned and officered altogether by wild beasts; but, at last, he came to enjoy the thing as a good joke, never failing to hail the men, not by their names as formerly, but, as he expressed it himself, “by their natur’s”; calling out “You cat, scratch this”; “You tiger, jump here”; “You hog, out of that dirt”; “You dog, scamper there”; “You horse, haul away,” and divers other similar conceits, that singularly tickled his fancy. The men themselves took up the ball, which they kept rolling, embellished with all sorts of nautical witticisms; their surname—they had but one, viz. Smith—being entirely dropped for the new appellations. Thus, the sounds of “Tom Dog,” “Jack Cat,” “Bill Tiger,” “Sam Hog,” and “Dick Horse,” were flying about the deck from morning to night.
Good humor is a great alleviator of bodily privation. From the time the ship lost sight of Staten Land, we had heavy weather, with hard gales from the southward and westward; and we had the utmost difficulty in making our southing. Observations now became a very difficult matter, the sun being invisible for a week at a time. The marine instinct of Noah, at this crisis, was of the last importance to all on board. He gave us the cheering assurance, however, from time to time, that we were going south, although the mates declared that they knew not where the ship was, or whither she was running; neither sun, moon, nor star having now been seen for more than a week.
We had been in this state of anxiety and doubt for about a fortnight, when Captain Poke suddenly appeared on deck, and called for the cabin-boy, in his usual stentorian and no-denial voice, by the name of “You Bob Ape”; for the duty of Robert requiring that he should be much about the persons of the monikins, I had given him a dress of apes’ skins, as a garb that would be more congenial to their tastes than that of a pig, or a weasel. Bob Ape was soon forthcoming, and, as he approached his master, he quietly turned his face from him, receiving, as a matter of course, three or four smart admonitory hints, by way of letting him know that he was to be active in the performance of the duty on which he was about to be sent. On this occasion I made an odd discovery. Bob had profited by the dimensions of his lower garment, which had been cut for a much larger boy (one of those who had broken down in essaying the true Doric of “Sir”), by stuffing it with an old union-jack-a sort of “sarvice,” as he afterwards told me, that saved him a good deal of wear and tear of skin. To return to passing events, however; when Robert had been duly kicked, he turned about manfully, and demanded the captain’s pleasure. He was told to bring the largest and fairest pumpkin he could find, from the private stores of Mr. Poke, that navigator never going to sea without a store of articles that he termed “Stunin’tun food.” The captain took the pumpkin between his legs, and carefully peeled off the whole of its greenish-yellow coat, leaving it a globe of a whitish color. He then asked for the tar-bucket, and, with his fingers, traced various marks, which were pretty accurate outlines of the different continents and the larger islands of the world. The region near the south pole, however, he left untouched; intimating that it contained certain sealing islands, which he considered pretty much as the private property of the Stunin’tunners.