Roughing It
The Admiral knew only one narrow line of conduct to pursue in any and
all cases where there was a fight, and that was to shoulder his way
straight in without an inquiry as to the rights or the merits of it, and
take the part of the weaker side.—And this was the reason why he was
always sure to be present at the trial of any universally execrated
criminal to oppress and intimidate the jury with a vindictive pantomime
of what he would do to them if he ever caught them out of the box. And
this was why harried cats and outlawed dogs that knew him confidently
took sanctuary under his chair in time of trouble. In the beginning he
was the most frantic and bloodthirsty Union man that drew breath in the
shadow of the Flag; but the instant the Southerners began to go down
before the sweep of the Northern armies, he ran up the Confederate
colors and from that time till the end was a rampant and inexorable
secessionist.
He hated intemperance with a more uncompromising animosity than any
individual I have ever met, of either sex; and he was never tired of
storming against it and beseeching friends and strangers alike to be
wary and drink with moderation. And yet if any creature had been
guileless enough to intimate that his absorbing nine gallons of
“straight” whiskey during our voyage was any fraction short of rigid or
inflexible abstemiousness, in that self-same moment the old man would
have spun him to the uttermost parts of the earth in the whirlwind of
his wrath. Mind, I am not saying his whisky ever affected his head or
his legs, for it did not, in even the slightest degree. He was a
capacious container, but he did not hold enough for that. He took a
level tumblerful of whisky every morning before he put his clothes
on—“to sweeten his bilgewater,” he said.—He took another after he got
the most of his clothes on, “to settle his mind and give him his
bearings.” He then shaved, and put on a clean shirt; after which he
recited the Lord’s Prayer in a fervent, thundering bass that shook the
ship to her kelson and suspended all conversation in the main cabin.
Then, at this stage, being invariably “by the head,” or “by the stern,”
or “listed to port or starboard,” he took one more to “put him on an
even keel so that he would mind his hellum and not miss stays and go
about, every time he came up in the wind.”—And now, his state-room door
swung open and the sun of his benignant face beamed redly out upon men
and women and children, and he roared his “Shipmets a’hoy!” in a way
that was calculated to wake the dead and precipitate the final
resurrection; and forth he strode, a picture to look at and a presence
to enforce attention. Stalwart and portly; not a gray hair; broadbrimmed
slouch hat; semi-sailor toggery of blue navy flannel—roomy and ample; a
stately expanse of shirt-front and a liberal amount of black silk neck-
cloth tied with a sailor knot; large chain and imposing seals impending
from his fob; awe-inspiring feet, and “a hand like the hand of
Providence,” as his whaling brethren expressed it; wrist-bands and
sleeves pushed back half way to the elbow, out of respect for the warm
weather, and exposing hairy arms, gaudy with red and blue anchors,
ships, and goddesses of liberty tattooed in India ink. But these details
were only secondary matters—his face was the lodestone that chained the
eye. It was a sultry disk, glowing determinedly out through a weather
beaten mask of mahogany, and studded with warts, seamed with scars,
“blazed” all over with unfailing fresh slips of the razor; and with
cheery eyes, under shaggy brows, contemplating the world from over the
back of a gnarled crag of a nose that loomed vast and lonely out of the
undulating immensity that spread away from its foundations. At his heels
frisked the darling of his bachelor estate, his terrier “Fan,” a
creature no larger than a squirrel. The main part of his daily life was
occupied in looking after “Fan,” in a motherly way, and doctoring her
for a hundred ailments which existed only in his imagination.
448.jpg (48K)
The Admiral seldom read newspapers; and when he did he never believed
anything they said. He read nothing, and believed in nothing, but “The
Old Guard,” a secession periodical published in New York. He carried a
dozen copies of it with him, always, and referred to them for all
required information. If it was not there, he supplied it himself, out
of a bountiful fancy, inventing history, names, dates, and every thing
else necessary to make his point good in an argument. Consequently he
was a formidable antagonist in a dispute. Whenever he swung clear of the
record and began to create history, the enemy was helpless and had to
surrender. Indeed, the enemy could not keep from betraying some little
spark of indignation at his manufactured history—and when it came to
indignation, that was the Admiral’s very “best hold.” He was always
ready for a political argument, and if nobody started one he would do it
himself. With his third retort his temper would begin to rise, and
within five minutes he would be blowing a gale, and within fifteen his
smoking-room audience would be utterly stormed away and the old man left
solitary and alone, banging the table with his fist, kicking the chairs,
and roaring a hurricane of profanity. It got so, after a while, that
whenever the Admiral approached, with politics in his eye, the
passengers would drop out with quiet accord, afraid to meet him; and he
would camp on a deserted field.
449.jpg (34K)
But he found his match at last, and before a full company. At one time
or another, everybody had entered the lists against him and been routed,
except the quiet passenger Williams. He had never been able to get an
expression of opinion out of him on politics. But now, just as the
Admiral drew near the door and the company were about to slip out,
Williams said:
“Admiral, are you _certain_ about that circumstance concerning the
clergymen you mentioned the other day?”—referring to a piece of the
Admiral’s manufactured history.
Every one was amazed at the man’s rashness. The idea of deliberately
inviting annihilation was a thing incomprehensible. The retreat came to
a halt; then everybody sat down again wondering, to await the upshot of
it. The Admiral himself was as surprised as any one. He paused in the
door, with his red handkerchief half raised to his sweating face, and
contemplated the daring reptile in the corner.
“_Certain_ of it? Am I _certain_ of it? Do you think I’ve been lying
about it? What do you take me for? Anybody that don’t know that
circumstance, don’t know anything; a child ought to know it. Read up
your history! Read it up— — — —, and don’t come asking a man if he’s
_certain_ about a bit of ABC stuff that the very southern niggers know
all about.”
Here the Admiral’s fires began to wax hot, the atmosphere thickened, the
coming earthquake rumbled, he began to thunder and lighten. Within three
minutes his volcano was in full irruption and he was discharging flames
and ashes of indignation, belching black volumes of foul history aloft,
and vomiting red-hot torrents of profanity from his crater. Meantime
Williams sat silent, and apparently deeply and earnestly interested in
what the old man was saying. By and by, when the lull came, he said in
the most deferential way, and with the gratified air of a man who has
had a mystery cleared up which had been puzzling him uncomfortably:
“_Now_ I understand it. I always thought I knew that piece of history
well enough, but was still afraid to trust it, because there was not
that convincing particularity about it that one likes to have in
history; but when you mentioned every name, the other day, and every
date, and every little circumstance, in their just order and sequence, I
said to myself, _this_ sounds something like—_this_ is history—_this_ is
putting it in a shape that gives a man confidence; and I said to myself
afterward, I will just ask the Admiral if he is perfectly certain about
the details, and if he is I will come out and thank him for clearing
this matter up for me. And that is what I want to do now—for until you
set that matter right it was nothing but just a confusion in my mind,
without head or tail to it.”
Nobody ever saw the Admiral look so mollified before, and so pleased.
Nobody had ever received his bogus history as gospel before; its
genuineness had always been called in question either by words or looks;
but here was a man that not only swallowed it all down, but was grateful
for the dose. He was taken a back; he hardly knew what to say; even his
profanity failed him. Now, Williams continued, modestly and earnestly:
“But Admiral, in saying that this was the first stone thrown, and that
this precipitated the war, you have overlooked a circumstance which you
are perfectly familiar with, but which has escaped your memory. Now I
grant you that what you have stated is correct in every detail—to wit:
that on the 16th of October, 1860, two Massachusetts clergymen, named
Waite and Granger, went in disguise to the house of John Moody, in
Rockport, at dead of night, and dragged forth two southern women and
their two little children, and after tarring and feathering them
conveyed them to Boston and burned them alive in the State House square;
and I also grant your proposition that this deed is what led to the
secession of South Carolina on the 20th of December following. Very
well.” [Here the company were pleasantly surprised to hear Williams
proceed to come back at the Admiral with his own invincible
weapon—clean, pure, _manufactured history_, without a word of truth in
it.] “Very well, I say. But Admiral, why overlook the Willis and Morgan
case in South Carolina? You are too well informed a man not to know all
about that circumstance. Your arguments and your conversations have
shown you to be intimately conversant with every detail of this national
quarrel. You develop matters of history every day that show plainly that
you are no smatterer in it, content to nibble about the surface, but a
man who has searched the depths and possessed yourself of everything
that has a bearing upon the great question. Therefore, let me just
recall to your mind that Willis and Morgan case—though I see by your
face that the whole thing is already passing through your memory at this
moment. On the 12th of August, 1860, _two months_ before the Waite and
Granger affair, two South Carolina clergymen, named John H. Morgan and
Winthrop L. Willis, one a Methodist and the other an Old School Baptist,
disguised themselves, and went at midnight to the house of a planter
named Thompson—Archibald F. Thompson, Vice President under Thomas
Jefferson,—and took thence, at midnight, his widowed aunt, (a Northern
woman,) and her adopted child, an orphan named Mortimer Highie,
afflicted with epilepsy and suffering at the time from white swelling on
one of his legs, and compelled to walk on crutches in consequence; and
the two ministers, in spite of the pleadings of the victims, dragged
them to the bush, tarred and feathered them, and afterward burned them
at the stake in the city of Charleston. You remember perfectly well what
a stir it made; you remember perfectly well that even the Charleston
_Courier_ stigmatized the act as being unpleasant, of questionable
propriety, and scarcely justifiable, and likewise that it would not be
matter of surprise if retaliation ensued. And you remember also, that
this thing was the _cause_ of the Massachusetts outrage. Who, indeed,
were the two Massachusetts ministers? and who were the two Southern
women they burned? I do not need to remind _you_, Admiral, with your
intimate knowledge of history, that Waite was the nephew of the woman
burned in Charleston; that Granger was her cousin in the second degree,