CHAPTER XII

ON BOARD A MAN-OF-WAR

"Oh, give me the rover's life-the joy, the thrill, the whirl! Let me feel thee again, old sea! let me leap into the saddle once more. I am sick of these terra firma toils and cares; sick of the dust and reek of towns. Let me hear the clatter of hailstones on icebergs. Let me snuff thee up, sea-breeze! and whinny in thy spray. Forbid it, sea-gods! intercede for me with Neptune, O sweet Amphitrite, that no dull clod may fall on my coffin! Be mine the tomb that swallowed up Pharaoh and all his hosts; let me lie down with Drake, where he sleeps in the sea." -HERMAN MELVILLE: White-Jacket.

IN 1898, there appeared the Memories of a Rear-Admiral Who Has Served for More Than Half a Century in the Navy of the United States. S. R. Franklin, the author of this volume, had lived a long and useful life, with no design during his years of activity, it would seem, of bowing himself out of the world as a man-of-letters. But in the leisure of elderly retirement, he was persuaded by his friends to get rid of his reminiscences once for all by putting them into a book. RearAdmiral Franklin took an inventory of his rich life, and accepted the challenge. Had he not roamed about the globe since he was sixteen years of age? And he had known a dozen famous Admirals, three Presidents, three Emperors, two Popes, five Christian Kings and a properly corresponding number of Queens, not to mention a whole army of lesser notables. In 1842, as midshipman aboard the United States frigate, Franklin cruised the Pacific. The United States stopped at Honolulu, touched at the Marquesas. Franklin reports that the Bay of Nukuheva "makes one of the most beautiful harbours I have ever seen." But upon the natives he bestowed the contempt of a civilised man: "for the Marquesans were cannibals of the worst kind, and no one who desired to escape roasting ever ventured away from the coast." The United States did not remain long in these waters, "where there was nothing to do but look at a lot of half-naked savages." So

off sailed the frigate to Tahiti, where a queen came aboard. But Franklin cannot remember whether it was Pomare or some other queen: "Ladies of that rank were not uncommon in those days in the South Seas."

Franklin had then been cruising among the islands of the Pacific for some months, and he was "not sorry when the time came to get under way for the coast." Men of Franklin's type are a credit to civilisation: men proud of their heritage, but unobtrusive in their pride. Franklin was unmoved by any sanctimonious hankering to improve the heathen, or by any romantic anxiety to ease into the mud of barbarism. "Savage and half-civilised life becomes very irksome," he says, "when the novelty is worn off."

"At Tahiti," he goes on to state, "we picked up some seamen who were on the Consul's hands. They were entered on the books of the ship, and became a portion of the crew. One of the number was Herman Melville, who became famous afterwards as a writer and an admiralty lawyer. He had gone X to sea for his health, and found himself stranded in the South Pacific. I do not remember what the trouble was, but he and his comrades had left the ship of which they were a portion of the crew. Melville wrote a book, well known in its day, (called White-Jacket, which had more influence in abolishing corporal punishment in the Navy than anything else. This book was placed on the desk of every member of Congress, and was a most eloquent appeal to the humane sentiment of the country. As an evidence of the good it did, a law was passed soon after the book appeared abolishing flogging in the Navy absolutely, without substituting any other mode of punishment in its stead; and this was exactly in accord with Melville's appeal."

"I do not think that I remember Melville at all," Franklin goes on to say; "occasionally will flash across my memory a maintop-man flitting across about the starboard gangway with a white jacket on, but there is not much reality in the picture which it presents to my mind. In his book he speaks of a certain seaman, Jack Chase, who was Captain of the maintop, of whom I have a very distinct recollection. He was about

as fine a specimen of seaman as I have ever seen in all my cruising. He was not only that, but he was a man of intelligence, and a born leader. His top-mates adored him, although he kept them up to the mark, and made every man do his share of work. Melville has given him considerable space in his book, and seems to have had intense admiration for him. He mentions also a number of officers whom it is not difficult to recognise. The Commanding Officer, who had a very red face, he called Captain Claret; a small but very energetic Midshipman, who made himself felt and heard about the decks, he called Mr. Pert; the Gunner was 'Old Combustibles.' He gives no names, but to any one who served in the Frigate United States it was easy to recognise the men by their sobriquets. Melville certainly did a grand work in bringing his ability as a writer and his experience as a seaman to bear upon the important matter-I mean corporal punishment -which had been the subject of so much discussion in and out of Congress."

The essential accuracy of Melville's account of life on board the Frigate United States is thus, in the above as in other passages, vouched for by a Rear-Admiral. Franklin, himself, however, is not exhaustively familiar with the life and works of Melville, making him an "admiralty lawyer" who went to sea for his health. And according to Franklin's account, Melville shipped on board the United States from Tahiti. According to Melville's own account, he left Eimeo-from the harbour of Tamai-not on board a man-of-war, but on board an American whaler bound for the fishing grounds off Japan.

The itinerary of Melville's rovings in the Pacific after he left Tahiti cannot be stated with any detailed precision. In an Appendix to the American edition of Typee, Melville says: "During a residence of four months at Honolulu, the author was in the confidence of an Englishman who was much employed by his lordship"-Sir George Paulet. In both Typee and Omoo he speaks of conditions in the Sandwich Islands with the familiarity of first-hand observation. The Frigate United States sailed from Hampton Roads early in January, 1842. It doubled the Horn late in February, and joined the

Pacific squadron at Valparaiso. After spending the winter of 1-842-3 off Monterey, the United States returned to Callao in the spring, and sailed for Honolulu, arriving in the early summer of 1843. According to his own account, Melville left Tahiti in the autumn of 1842. The United States left Tahiti in the summer of 1843. Melville speaks of revisiting the Marquesas and Tahiti after the experiences recorded in Typee and Omoo. In Typee he says: "Between two and three years after the adventures recorded in this volume, I chanced, while aboard a man-of-war, to touch at these islands"-the Marquesas. Though in this statement Melville is patently careless in his chronology, there is no reason to doubt his geography. According to the hypothesis that offers fewest difficulties—and none of these at all serious—it would appear that Melville left the Society Islands in the autumn of 1842, on board a whaler bound for the coast of Japan, to arrive in Honolulu some time in the early part of 1843, where, according to Arthur Stedman, he was "employed as a clerk." In the Introductory Note to White-Jacket he says: "In the year 1843 I shipped as 'ordinary seaman' on board a United States frigate, then lying in a harbour of the Pacific Ocean. After remaining in the frigate for more than a year, I was discharged from the service upon the vessel's arrival home." Melville was discharged in Boston, in October, 1844. It would appear that Melville shipped on board the United States, from Honolulu, in the summer of 1843, touching again at the Marquesas and at Tahiti, and returning home by way of the Peruvian ports. Of Melville's experiences between the time of his leaving the Society Islands and that of his homeward cruise as a sailor in the United States Navy, nothing is known beyond the meagre details already stated.

In White-Jacket; or, the World in a Man-of-War (1850) Melville has left a fuller account, however, of his experiences on board the United States. The opening of White-Jacket finds Melville at Callao, on the coast of Peru-the last harbour he touched in the Pacific. In Typee and Omoo he had already recounted his adventures in the South Seas, with all the crispness and lucidity of fresh discovery. While on board

the United States he returned to old harbours, and sailed past familiar islands. But White-Jacket is not a Yarrow Revisited.

On the showing of White-Jacket, Melville's life in the navy was, perhaps, the happiest period in his life. It is true that in Typee he wrote: "I will frankly confess that after passing a few weeks in the valley of the Marquesas, I formed a higher estimate of human nature than I had ever before entertained. But, alas, since then I have been one of the crew of a man-ofwar, and the pent-up wickedness of five hundred men has nearly overturned all my previous theories." And in WhiteJacket he has many a very dark word to say for the navy. Sailors, as a class, do, of course, entertain liberal notions concerning the Decalogue; but in this they resemble landsmen, both Christian and cannibal. And in Melville's day-as before and after-from a frigate's crew might be culled out men of all callings and vocations, from a backslidden parson to a broken-down comedian. It is an old saying that "the sea and the gallows refuse nothing." But withal, more than one good man has been hanged. "The Navy," Melville says, "is the asylum for the perverse, the home of the unfortunate. Here the sons of adversity meet the children of calamity, and here the children of calamity meet the offspring of sin." According to this version, a typical man-of-war was a sort of State Prison afloat. "Wrecked on a desert shore," Melville says, "a man-of-war's crew could quickly found an Alexandria by themselves, and fill it with all the things which go to make up a capital." The United States, surely, lacked in none of the contradictions that go to make up a metropolis: "though boasting some fine fellows here and there, yet, on the whole, charged to the combings of hatchways with the spirit of Belial and unrighteousness." Or it was like a Parisian lodging house, turned upside down: the first floor, or deck, being rented by a lord; the second by a select club of gentlemen; the third, by crowds of artisans; and the fourth-on a man-of-war a basement of indefinite depth, with ugly-looking fellows gazing out at the windows-by a whole rabble of common people.

The good or bad temper, the vices and virtues of men-ofwar's men were in a great degree attributable, Melville states,