“Some of the privates in Pat’s regiment were invalided, and were on the point of returning to Old England, and Pat was determined to return too. Another man would have thought the matter over coolly, but Pat had no thought in him; so, splitting a brace of bullets into half a dozen pieces, and ramming them into his pistol, he pulled the trigger, and sent the whole charge through his left hand, that he might be invalided.
“I was close beside him when the regimental surgeon came in to examine his hand. After feeling among the shattered bones for some time,—‘I can save the thumb and finger,’ cried the surgeon; and taking out his instruments, in a few minutes he had removed the whole of the shattered hand, all but the thumb and finger.
“You would have thought that, what with the pistol-charge and the surgeon’s knife, Pat’s Irish heart would have been conquered—but no, nothing like it.—‘What do you guess, now, I am thinking about?’ said he to the surgeon. ‘Can’t guess at all,’ replied the surgeon. ‘Why,’ said Pat, coolly, ‘sure enough I was thinking that I should take a pinch of snuff yet, with my odd thumb and finger when I got home to my mother in ould Ireland.’
“Pat got neither prize-money nor promotion by this mad freak, for a court-martial awarded him a thousand lashes. The greater part of his punishment, however, was remitted; he was sent up the country to be a sweeper in a fort, and, for aught I know to the contrary, he may be there still. Pat was a drunkard, and when a soldier gives way to drinking, farewell to his good character and his dreams of promotion! Drunkenness is of itself a degrading vice, and it leads a man on into almost every other. Now, with such characters as Pat, how could the army be kept together without discipline?”
“Very true. Discipline must be kept up in the army, and indeed in the navy too.”
“I will give you, boys, two striking instances of the effect of discipline on board ship. They are taken from the Supplement to the Saturday Magazine, though I believe they were at first related by that excellent and well-informed officer, Captain Basil Hall, in his interesting ‘Fragments of Voyages and Travels.’ The first instance will show you the great advantage of steadiness and discipline in circumstances of danger. His Majesty’s ship Atalanta, commanded by Captain Hickey, in November 1813, was standing in for Halifax harbour, in one of the thick fogs so frequent on that coast, when it unhappily mistook the signal-guns of another vessel, in the same situation, for those which are fired during such weather from Sambo Rock, as guides to ships entering the harbour; the consequence was, that the Atalanta struck on the rocks, and the first blow carried away the rudder, half the stern-post, together with great part of the false keel, and, it is believed, a portion of the bottom. The ship instantly filled with water, and was buoyed up merely by the empty casks, till the decks and sides were burst and riven asunder by the waves.
“The captain, who throughout continued as composed as if nothing remarkable had occurred, then ordered the guns to be thrown overboard; but before this could be even attempted, the ship fell over so much that the men could not stand. In lowering the boats for the crew to take to, one, the jolly-boat, was lost; the ship was now fast falling over on her beam-ends, and directions were given to cut away the masts; but the crash caused the ship to part in two, and a few seconds afterwards she again broke right across, between the fore and main-masts.
“A considerable crowd of men had got into the pinnace (or boat), in hopes that she might float as the ship sunk; but the captain, seeing that the boat was overloaded, desired some twenty men to quit her, and his orders were as promptly obeyed as they were coolly given, so completely was discipline maintained by the character of the commander, and consequent confidence of the crew. The pinnace then floated, but was immediately upset by a sea; the people in her, however, imitating the conduct of their captain, retained their self-possession, and, by great exertions, righted the boat, and got her clear of the wreck, where, at a little distance off, they waited further orders from their captain, who, with forty men, still clung to the remains of the vessel. It was now, however, absolutely necessary to quit it, as the wreck was disappearing rapidly; and in order to enable the boats to contain them, the men, as removed to the pinnace, were laid flat in the bottom like herrings in a cask, while the small boats returned to pick up the rest, which was at last accomplished with great difficulty; but, except the despatches, which had been secured by the captain from the first, and a chronometer, everything on board was lost. The pinnace now contained eighty persons, the cutter forty-two, and the gig eighteen, with which load they barely floated, the captain being the very last person to quit the wreck of the ship; and hardly had he got into the boat when the last fragments disappeared: three hearty cheers were given by the gallant crew. The fog continued as dense as ever, and they had no means of knowing in which direction to proceed, and if it had not been for a small compass, which one man had appended to his watch, for a toy, it is most probable that they would not yet have been preserved; at last they were all landed in safety, about twenty miles from Halifax, nearly naked, wet through and shivering, and miserably cramped by the close crowding in the boats. The captain took the worst provided, and most fatigued, round to the harbour in the boats, and the rest, under the officers, marched across the country in three divisions, with as much regularity as if going well-appointed on some regular expedition, though very few had any shoes, and they had to traverse a country only partially cleared; the same evening the whole crew, without one missing, officers, men, and boys assembled at Halifax in as exact order as if their ship had met with no accident.”
“That is a very striking account indeed! Captain Hickey was a noble fellow!”
“The second story is tragically different from the first, and presents one of the most striking pictures of passive courage ever presented to the contemplation. A captain of a ship of war, whose sole object of ambition was to distinguish himself by capturing an enemy’s vessel, conceived that his surest mode of obtaining the fulfilment of his wishes was by disciplining his crew so strictly, that, in the event of an engagement, he would be sure of victory by his superiority in this respect; but, in order to obtain this, he harassed his crew by such strict regulations, such constant and unremitting exertions, and such excessive severity, as to alienate all affection, and to bring his crew to the verge of insubordination.