[ALLY SOMERS.—A TALE OF THE COAST-GUARD.]
When I joined the Scorpion sloop of war, then (1810) on the West India station, there were a father and son among the crew whose names, as borne on the ship's books, were John Somers and John Alice Somers. The oddity in this country of giving a boy a female baptismal name had been no doubt jestingly remarked upon by those who were aware of it, but with the sailors the lad passed as Ally Somers. The father was approaching fifty, the son could not have been more than seventeen years of age. The elder Somers, who had attained to the rating of a boatswain, was a stern, hard, silent man, with a look as cold and clear as polished steel, and a cast-iron mouth, indicative of inflexible, indomitable firmness of will and resolution. The son, on the contrary, though somewhat resembling his father in outline of feature, had a mild, attractive, almost feminine aspect, and a slight graceful frame. I was not long in discovering that, obdurate and self-engrossed as the man appeared, the boy was really the idol-image in which his affections and his hopes were centred. His eye constantly followed the motions of the lad, and it appeared to be his unceasing aim and study to lighten the duties he had to perform, and to shield him from the rough usage to which youngsters in his position were generally subjected by the motley crews of those days. One day a strong instance in proof of this master-feeling occurred. Ally Somers some time previously, when on shore with a party dispatched to obtain a supply of water, had, during the temporary absence of the officer in command, been rather severely rope's-ended by one of the seamen for some trifling misconduct, and a few slight marks were left on the lad's back. The rage of the father, when informed of the circumstance, was extreme, and it was with difficulty that he was restrained from inflicting instant chastisement on the offender. An opportunity for partially wreaking his hoarded vengeance occurred about six weeks afterward, and it was eagerly embraced. The sailor who had ill-used young Somers was sentenced to receive two dozen lashes for drunkenness and insubordination. He was ordered to strip, placed at the gratings, and the punishment began. Somers the boatswain, iron or sour-tempered as he might be, was by no means harsh or cruel in his office, and his assistants, upon whom the revolting office of flogging usually devolved, influenced by him, were about the gentlest-handed boatswain's-mates I ever saw practice. On this occasion he was in another and a very different mood. Two blows only had been struck, when Somers, with an angry rebuke to the mate for not doing his duty, snatched the cat from his hand, and himself lashed the culprit with a ferocity so terribly effective, that Captain Boyle, a merciful and just officer, instantly remitted half the number of lashes, and the man was rescued from the unsparing hands of the vindictive boatswain.
Other instances of the intensity of affection glowing within the stern man's breast for his comparatively weak and delicate boy manifested themselves. Once in action, when the lad, during a tumultuous and murderous struggle in beating off a determined attempt to carry the sloop by boarding, chanced to stumble on the slippery deck, he was overtaken before he could recover himself, and involved in the fierce assault which at the forecastle was momently successful. I was myself hotly engaged in another part of the fight; but attention being suddenly called to the forepart of the ship by the enemy's triumphant shouts, I glanced round just in time to see the boatswain leap, with the yell and bound of a tiger, into the mêlée, and strike right and left with such tremendous ferocity and power as instantly to check the advancing rush. Our men promptly rallied, and the deck was in a few minutes cleared of every living foe that had recently profaned it. Ally Somers, who had received a rather severe flesh wound, and fainted from loss of blood, was instantly caught up by his father, and carried with headlong impatience below. When the surgeon, after a brief look at the hurt, said, "There is no harm done, Somers," the high-strung nerves of the boatswain gave way, and he fell back upon a locker, temporarily prostrate and insensible from sudden revulsion of feeling. Several times I was an unintentional auditor of scraps of conversation between the two while the lad was on the sick-list, from which I gathered that Ally was the sole issue of a marriage which had left bitter memories in the mind of the father; but whether arising from the early death of his wife, or other causes, I did not ascertain. Somers was, it appeared a native of the west of England, and it was quite evident had received a much better education than usually falls to individuals of his class.
At the close of the war Somers and his son were, with thousands of others, turned adrift from the royal service. Some months after my appointment to the command of the revenue-cutter, I chanced to meet the father in the village of Talton, about four miles out of Southampton, on the New Forest Road. He had, I found re-entered the navy, but chancing to receive a hurt by the falling of a heavy block on his right knee, had been invalided with a small pension, upon which he was now living at about a hundred yards from the spot where we had accidentally met. Ally, he informed me, was the skipper of a small craft, trading between Guernsey and Southampton. There was little change in the appearance of the man except that the crippled condition of his leg appeared to have had an effect the reverse of softening upon his stem and rugged aspect and temper. When paid off he was, I knew, entitled to a considerable sum in prize-money, the greater part of which he told me he had recently received.
About two months after this meeting with the father I fell in with the son. I was strolling at about eleven in the forenoon along the front of the Southampton custom-house, when my eye fell upon a young man in a seaman's dress, busily engaged with three others in loading a cart with bundles of laths which had been landed shortly before from a small vessel alongside the quay. It was Ally Somers sure enough; and so much improved in looks since I last saw him, that but for a certain air of fragility—inherited probably from his mother—he might have been pronounced a handsome fine young fellow. The laths, upward of two hundred bundles, which he was so busily assisting to cart, he had brought from Guernsey, and were a very common importation from that island: Guernsey possessing the right of sending its own produce customs free to England, a slight duty, only tantamount to what the foreign timber of which the laths were made would have been liable to, was levied upon them, and this was ascertained by the proper officer simply measuring the length and girth of the bundles. This had been done, and the laths marked as "passed." It struck me that the manner of Ally Somers was greatly flurried and excited, and when he saw me approaching, evidently with an intention to accost him, this agitation perceptibly increased. He turned deadly pale, and absolutely trembled with ill-concealed apprehension. He was somewhat re-assured by my frank salutation; and after a few common-place inquiries I walked away, evidently to his great relief, and he with his sailors continued their eager work of loading the cart. I could not help suspecting that something was wrong, though I could not make up my mind to verify the surmise his perturbed and hurried manner excited. Once in a skirmish on shore his father, the boatswain, had saved my life by sending a timely bullet through the head of a huge negro who held me for the moment at his mercy. Besides I might be wrong after all, and I had no right to presume that the officer who had passed the laths had not made a sufficient examination of them. The flurry of the young man might arise from physical weakness and the severe labor he was performing in such hot weather. These reasons, or more truly these excuses for doing nothing, were passing through my brain, when I observed the hasty approach of the collector of customs himself toward the cart, followed by several of his subordinates. Young Somers saw him as quickly as I did, and the young man's first impulse, it was quite plain, was flight. A thought, no doubt, of the hopelessness of such an attempt arrested his steps, and he stood quaking with terror by the side of the cart, his right hand grasping for support at one of the wheel-spokes.
"One of you lend me a knife," said the collector, addressing the officers of customs.
A knife was quickly opened and handed to him: he severed the strong cords which bound one of the bundles of laths together, and they flew asunder, disclosing a long tin tube of considerable diameter, closely rammed with tobacco! All the other bundles contained a similar deposit; and so large was the quantity of the heavily-taxed weed thus unexpectedly made lawful prize of, that a profit, I was assured, of not less than £500 or £600 would have been made by the audacious smuggler had he succeeded in his bold and ingenious attempt. The ends of the bundles had been filled up with short pieces of lath, so that, except by the process now adopted, it was impossible to detect that the cargo was not bonâ fide what it had been declared to be. The penalties to which Somers had rendered himself liable were immense, the vessel also was forfeited, and the unfortunate young man's liberty at the mercy of the crown. He looked the very picture of despair, and I felt assured that ruin, utter and complete, had fallen upon him.
He was led off in custody, and had gone some dozen paces when he stopped shortly, appeared to make some request to the officers by whom he was escorted, and then turning round, intimated by a supplicatory gesture that he wished to speak to me. I drew near, and at my request the officers fell back out of hearing. He was so utterly prostrated by the calamity by which he had been so suddenly overtaken, that he could not for several moments speak intelligibly. I felt a good deal concerned for so mere a boy, and one too so entirely unfitted by temperament and nerve to carry through such desperate enterprises, or bear up against their failure.
"This is a bad business," I said; "but the venture has not, I trust, been made with your own or your father's money?
"Every penny of it," he replied, in a dry, fainting voice, "was our own. Father lent me all his prize-money, and we are both miserable beggars."