CHAPTER III.
“Beauties of the Sea”—First Views of Cracker Unionism.
On our return to the Fortress, the “Wayanda” was ready; there was a hurried transhipment in the dark; not a little dismay at the straitened proportions of the cabin; an assignment of state-rooms, which gave me the D. D. of the party as chum; and so—amid the Doctor’s loud groans and lamentations over confining a rational human being in a straight jacket of a bed like that—to sleep.
There was a very hasty toilette next morning, and a very undignified rush for the fresh air on deck. We had started in the night, were well out on the ocean, a pretty heavy sea was running, and the mettlesome little “Wayanda” was giving us a taste of her qualities. Nothing could exceed the beauty of her plunges fore and aft, and lurches from port to starboard; but the party were sadly lacking in enthusiasm. Presently breakfast was announced, and we all went below very bravely and ranged ourselves about the table. Before the meal was half over, the Captain and the Doctor’s were left in solitary state to finish it alone. For myself—although seasoned, as I had vainly imagined, by some experiences in tolerably heavy storms—I freely confess to the double enjoyment of the single cup of tea I managed to swallow. “For,” said the Dominie, argumentatively, “you have the pleasure of enjoying it first as it goes down, and then a second time as it comes up.”
To keep one another in countenance as we held our uncertain positions on the rolling and plunging deck, we combined to rehearse all the old jokes about sea sickness. One gave a definition of it, which, like many another indifferent thing, has been unwarrantably fathered on the late President. “Sea sickness is a disorder which for the first hour makes you afraid you’ll die, but by the second hour makes you afraid you won’t!” Another recited Artemus Ward’s groaning lamentation over Point Judith, to the effect that he “never before saw a place where it was so hard to keep inside one’s clothes and outside one’s breakfast!” “Sure, it isn’t say sick yez are,” pleasantly suggested an Irish engineer, among the officers, who looked provokingly happy amid all the pitching—“it isn’t say sick yez are; but yez mighty sick of the say!” “O si sic omnes!” punned the Chief Justice. How the rest stood it I don’t know; but that was the last straw, and drove one unfortunate of the party to his state-room, and a basin and towel.
Toward evening the sea calmed down, and one after another emerged on deck. The air was delightfully bracing; the moon sent its broad streams of light, shaking across the waters; the revolving light of Hatteras shone out—guide and safeguard to a hundred eyes besides our own—and so with calmest weather, and a delicious beauty of scene that no words need be vainly employed in efforts to describe, we spent half the night in watching the passage of the ship by the most dangerous part of the Atlantic coast. Next morning, at breakfast, we were steaming under the guns of Port Macon into the harbor where Butler and Porter rendezvoused for Fort Fisher.
As a boat’s crew slowly pulled some of our party through the tortuous channel by which even the lightest gigs have to approach the single landing of Beaufort, the guns of the naval force began to thunder out a salute for the Chief Justice. “How many guns does a Chief Justice receive?” inquired one, as he counted the successive discharges. “You’d a great deal better ask,” reprovingly hinted the Doctor, “how many guns a Baptist minister receives!” “Well, how many, Doctor!” “Oh, just count these up, and then you’ll know!” With which church-militant suggestion, we rounded to at a crazy old wharf, climbed up a pair of rickety steps that gave the Doctor premonitions of more immersion than even he had bargained for, and stood in the town of Beaufort, North Carolina. In front of us was the Custom House—a square, one-story frame building, perched upon six or eight posts—occupied now by a Deputy Treasury Agent. A narrow strip of sand, plowed up by a few cart wheels, and flanked by shabby-looking old frame houses, extended along the water front, and constituted the main business street of a place that, however dilapidated and insignificant, must live in the history of the struggle just ended. Near the water’s edge was a small turpentine distillery, the only manufacturing establishment of the place.
The landing of a boat’s crew, with an officer in charge and a flag fluttering at the stern, seemed to be an event in Beaufort, and we were soon surrounded by the notabilities. A large, heavily and coarsely-built man, of unmistakable North Carolina origin, with the inevitable bilious look, ragged clothes and dirty shirt, was introduced, with no little eclat, as “the Senator from this District.” “Of what Senate?” some one inquired. “The North Caroliner Senate, Sir,” “Umph, Rebel Senate of North Carolina,” growled the Captain, sotto voce; “you make a devil of a fuss about your dignity! North Carolina Rebel Senate be hanged! A New York constable outranks you.” But the Senator didn’t hear; and his manner showed plainly enough that no doubts of his importance ever disturbed the serene workings of his own mind. The Clerk of the Court, the Postmaster, the doctor, the preacher and other functionaries were speedily added to the group that gathered in the sand bank called a pavement.
“How are your people feeling?” some one asked. “Oh, well, sir; we all went out unwillingly, you know,” responded the legislator, fresh from the meetings of the Rebel Senate at Raleigh, “and most of us are very glad to get back.” “Have you no violent Rebels yet?” “Yes, quite a good many, among the young bloods; but even they all feel as if they had been badly whipped, and want to give in.” “Then they really feel themselves whipped?” “Yes, you’ve subjugated us at last,” with a smile which showed that the politician thought it not the worst kind of a joke after all.
“And, of course, then you have only to submit to any terms the conquerors may impose?” “No, sir—oh, ah—yes, any terms that could be honorably offered to a proud, high-minded people!” The rest of the dignitaries nodded their heads approvingly at this becoming intimation of the terms the “subjugated” State could be induced to accept. It was easy to see that the old political tricks were not forgotten, and that the first inch of wrong concession would be expected to lead the way to many an ell.