“Well, you see, youngsters, we carried pretty taunt masts and square yards; and as several sister brigs of ours had been lost, with all hands, the commander considered it as well to be cautious, so that we might not go and keep them company. It became therefore necessary to make the men sharp when all hands were turned up to shorten sail; and he let it be understood that he intended on such occasions to punish the last man off the lower deck. He was a tall, thin man—so tall that he found his height very inconvenient in a ten-gun brig, and he used to put his looking-glass on deck and his head through the cabin skylight when he wanted to shave in the morning. Billy Blazes, who was a quartermaster, was about as short and stout as the commander was tall and thin. One day, just as the commander came on deck, and was standing near the companion hatchway, seeing a squall coming along the water, he shouted pretty sharply—
“‘All hands, shorten sail!’
“Now Billy—as I take it for granted that Snatchblock is right in saying it was he—was below, doing something or other, and guessing that he would be late if he came up the main hatchway, he bolted through the gunroom passage, thinking that no one would see him, and up he sprang by the companion hatchway. At that moment the commander turned round, and, receiving Billy’s head in the pit of his stomach, was doubled up, and sent sprawling over on the deck, the pain preventing him from seeing who had done the deed. Billy did not, you may be sure, stop to apologise; but up the rigging he sprang, before the commander or any of the officers knew who it was, and you may depend upon it he did not inform them. His messmates kept his secret, and it was not till the brig was paid off that the truth slipped out.”
“I remember the same system as that you speak of being carried on in a ship I once served in,” observed Norris. “The first lieutenant used to put down the name of the last man off the lower deck on a slip of paper, and at the end of three months he took out the slip, and counted who had been most frequently guilty, and they were invariably punished. However, as several good men got punished, the system became very unpopular, and as many deserted in consequence it was given up.”
On this Tom told some of the stories about black-listing which he had heard from Admiral Triton.
“I once served under a captain in that respect like Jerry Hawthorne,” said Higson. “Not that he was in general severe, I must own; but he used to come down pretty sharply on us midshipmen occasionally. We were in the Mediterranean, and brought up in Malta harbour. I and two other youngsters were greatly addicted to fishing. This the captain did not approve of, as he said that the bait and lines dirtied the ship’s side, and so he issued an order against it. Still fish we would, whenever we had a chance, and we three, knowing that the captain had gone on shore, were thus engaged one day, when he unexpectedly returned on board, and found us hauling up fish after fish, which left their scales sticking to the frigate’s polished sides. He sent for us aft.
“‘I will show you, my lads, how to fish,’ he said, with a bland smile, and thereon he ordered three boarding-pikes to be brought, to each of which he had about four feet of rope yarn secured, with a hand-lead at the end. ‘Now, come along, lads, and you shall begin your fishing,’ he said, with a quiet chuckle, and he then made each of us hold a boarding-pike straight out over the taffrail, at arm’s length, during the whole of the watch, telling the first lieutenant to keep an eye on us. You may be sure our arms ached; and when the lieutenant turned another way, we took the liberty of letting the pikes rest on the rail. Every now and then the captain would come up, and with that bland smile of his ask us in a cheerful voice—
“‘Have you caught any fish, my lads?’ and when we said ‘No, sir,’ he would answer—
“‘Try a little longer; you will have better luck by-and-by.’
“I can tell you, it was about as aggravating a punishment as I ever endured. It cured us, for the time at least, of our love of fishing.”