CHAPTER VII.GEOLOGY—NAUTICAL SQUABBLES.
About this period I began to dabble a little in geology, for which science I had acquired a taste by inheritance, and, in some degree, from companionship with more than one of the Scottish school, who, at the beginning of this century, were considered more than half-cracked, merely for supporting the igneous theory of Dr. Hutton, which, with certain limitations and extensions, and after thirty years of controversy, experiment, and observation, appears to be now pretty generally adopted. Sailors, indeed, have excellent opportunities of making geological observations, for they have the advantage of seeing Nature, as it were, with her face washed, more frequently than most otherobservers; and can seldom visit any coast, new or old, without having it in their power to bring off something interesting to inquirers in this branch of knowledge. That is, supposing they have eyes to see, and capacity to describe, what meets their observation. Some people cannot go beyond a single fact or two actually lying under their very noses; and you might as well expect them to fly as to combine these particulars, or to apply them to the purposes of science at large. Others, again, from the same want of accurate comprehension, or from sheer mental indolence, jump at once from the most trifling local circumstances to the broadest and most unwarranted generalisations.
It would be difficult, if not quite impossible, by dint of any number of precepts, to drive geology, or any other kind of instruction, into the noddles of some folks; so that it will often seem an even chance with a blockhead, whether, when he is obliged to think, he will generalise too much or too little. I remember, for example, once lying at anchor, for some weeks, in the harbourof Vigo, on the west coast of Spain, during which time, for a piece of fun, the first lieutenant desired one of the youngsters on board to write a letter to his friends at home.
“What in the world, sir, am I to say?” asked the noodle of a fellow, after pondering over the subject for a long time.
“Say?—Why, describe the country, and the manners of the people—tell how they behaved to you.”
To work went the youth, sorely bothered; and though he had been on shore many times, he could extract nothing from his memory. The first lieutenant, however, who was inexorable, insisted upon the letter being written, and locked him up in his cabin till he intimated, by a certain signal, that the epistle was ready for inspection. The following was the result of four hours’ painful labour:—
“All Spain is hilly—so is this. The natives all wear wooden shoes, and they are all a set of brutes, of which I take this to witness, that one of them called me a Picaroon.
“I remain, &c.”
Although geology be a topic often intensely interesting on the spot, it is not always easy to give it this character to people at a distance, who care very little whether the world has been baked or boiled, or both, or neither. Most persons, indeed, remain all their lives quite indifferent whether the globe has come into its present shape by what is called Chance, that is, I suppose, by means which we cannot investigate, and can only guess at,—or whether its various changes are susceptible of philosophical examination, and their history of being recorded with more or less precision. The sound geologist of the present day, it will be observed, professes to have nothing to do with the origin of things, but merely investigates the various physical revolutions which have taken place on the earth’s surface, by the instrumentality of natural causes. The great charm of this fascinating science, accordingly, though it may be difficult to say why, consists in the manner in which the Reason and the Imagination are brought together, in regions where two such travellers could hardly have been expected to meet.
Many practical and popular questions also mingle themselves up with the scientific inquiries of geology. I remember, for instance, even when a boy, taking a great interest, on this account, in the plaster of Paris quarries of Nova Scotia. This formation shews itself generally above ground, and is of a dingy white colour, the parts exposed to the air being crumbly or decomposed. The workmen having removed the superincumbent earth, and the rotten rock, as they call it, blast the solid gypsum with gunpowder, and, having broken it into blocks sufficiently small to be handled, sell it to the American dealers. A number of vessels are daily employed in carrying it to New York, Philadelphia, and Baltimore. In my early notes, I find it gravely stated, as a thing generally understood, that most of this gypsum was sold to the millers in the United States, for the purpose of adulterating their flour! Prejudice apart, however, the fact is quite the reverse of what I believed in my youth; for, by an ingenious system of regulations, the Americans contrive that the best quality should have anadvantage over bad in leaving the country. Such, indeed, is the success of these measures, that I can safely say I never saw a barrel of it that was not excellent.
Besides this capital flour, the Americans export biscuit of a delicious quality to all parts of the globe; and those only who have known the amount of discomfort produced by living on the ‘remainder biscuit after a voyage,’ perhaps not good of its kind originally, can justly appreciate the luxury of opening a barrel of crackers from New York! By the way, it is a curious and not unimportant fact in nautical affairs, though only discovered of late years, that the best way to keep this description of bread is to exclude the air from it as much as possible. In former times, and even for some years after I entered the navy, the practice was, to open the bread-room frequently, and, by means of funnels made of canvass, called windsails, to force the external air amongst the biscuit, in order, as was supposed, to keep it sweet and fresh. Nothing, it now appears, could have been devised more destructive to it; and thereason is easily explained. It is only in fine weather that this operation can be performed, at which seasons the external air is generally many degrees hotter than the atmosphere of the bread-room, which, from being low down in the ship, acquires, like a cellar, a pretty uniform temperature. The outer air, from its warmth, and from sweeping along the surface of the sea, is at all times charged with a considerable degree of vapour, the moisture of which is sure to be deposited upon any body it comes in contact with, colder than the air which bears it along. Consequently, the biscuit, when exposed to these humid currents, is rendered damp, and the process of decay, instead of being retarded, is rapidly assisted by the ventilation. This ancient system of airing is now so entirely exploded, that in some ships the biscuit is placed in separate closed cases, in which it is packed like slates, with great care, and the covers are then caulked or sealed down. By this contrivance, no more biscuit need be exposed than is absolutely necessary for the immediate consumption of the crew. If I amnot mistaken, this is the general practice in American men-of-war, and it certainly ought to be adopted by us.
I remember once, when sailing in the Pacific Ocean, about a couple of hundred leagues to the south of the coast of Peru, falling in with a ship, and buying some American biscuit which had been more than a year from home. It was enclosed in a new wine puncheon, which was, of course, perfectly air-tight. When we opened it, the biscuit smelled as fresh and new as if it had been taken from the oven only the day before. Even its flavour and crispness were preserved so entire, that I thought we should never have done cranching it.
We were not particularly fortunate in making many captures on the Halifax station, in our early cruises, after the war broke out. But the change which the renewal of hostilities made in our habits was great. Instead of idly rotting in harbour, our ship was now always at sea, on the look-out,—a degree of vigilance, which, as will be seen, had its reward in due season. In the meantime,we discovered that a midshipman’s life was full of interest and curiosity, especially to those who thirsted to see new countries and new climates. Of this matter of climate, I find a characteristic enough touch in one of my early letters.
“We have been on a cruise for many months; but we did not take a single prize, although all the rest of the ships of the station have been making captures. I hope we shall be more fortunate next time, as we intend to go to a better place. Our last cruise carried us a long way to the southward, where the weather was so very hot, that it became impossible to do any thing in comfort, night or day. In the night time we could hardly sleep, and in the day we were scorched by the sun. When our candles were lighted, they melted away by degrees, and often tumbled on the table by their own weight, or, perhaps, fell plump into the victuals!”
Even at this distance of time, I have a most painfully distinct recollection of these dirty tallow candles in the midshipmen’s birth—dips, I think, they were called—smellingof mutton fat, and throwing up a column of smoke like that from a steamboat’s chimney. These ‘glims’ yielded but little light, by reason, possibly, of a huge wick occupying more than half the area of the flame, and demanding the incessant application of our big-bellied snuffers to make the darkness visible.
This, in its turn, reminds me of a piece of cock-pit manners, which truth obliges me to divulge, although, certainly, not very much to our credit. It was the duty of the unfortunate wight who sat nearest the candle—grievously misnamed the ‘light’—to snuff off its monstrous cauliflower of a head from time to time; and certainly his office was no sinecure. Sometimes, however, either from being too much absorbed in his book, or from his hand being tired, he might forget to ‘top the glim,’ as it was called—glim being, I suppose, a contraction of the too obvious word glimmer. On these occasions of neglect, when things were returning fast to their primeval darkness, any one of the company was entitled to call out “Top!”upon which all the rest were bound to vociferate the same word, and he who was the last to call out “Top!” was exposed to one of the following disagreeable alternatives—either to get up and snuff the candle, at whatever distance he might be seated, or to have the burning snuff thrown in his face by any one who was within reach, and chose to pinch it off with his finger and thumb. It is true there was always some trouble in this operation, and some little risk of burning the fingers, to say nothing of the danger to His Majesty’s ship; but the delightful task of teaching a messmate good breeding, by tossing a handful of burning tallow-candle snuff in his eyes, was, of course, a happiness too great to be resisted.
In speaking thus of the midshipmen’s birth, and of their occasional ruggedness of manners, I should be doing wrong to leave an impression that they were a mere lawless set of harumscarum scamps. Quite the contrary; for we had a code of laws for our government, which, for precision and distinctness of purpose, might have rivalledmany of those promulgated by the newest-born states of the world, in these days of political parturition. I observe, that young countries, like young people, whether in a midshipman’s mess, or any where else, delight in the indulgence of the fond and false idea, that it is easy to regulate the fluctuations of human nature exactly as they please, by the mere force of written constitutions. They always ‘remember to forget,’ that institutions, to be in the smallest degree effective in practice, must be made to fit the existing state of society, and that society cannot possibly be made to fit them. They almost all run away, however, with the vainest of vain notions, that established habits, old prejudices, with all the other fixed and peculiar circumstances of the time and place in which they find themselves, have become, of a sudden, so pliable, that they can be essentially and speedily modified by artificial legislation alone! On this fallacious principle we framed a set of regulations for our mess, of which I recollect only one, giving, I admit, rather a queer idea of the state of things in ourmaritime world. It ran thus:—“If any member of the larboard mess shall so far forget the manners of a gentleman as to give the lie direct to one of his messmates, he shall be fined one dollar.”
This fine, it must be observed, was intended purely as a propitiation to the offended dignity of the mess, and was quite independent of the personal arrangements which, on such occasions, generally took place in the cock-pit outside. These battles royal were fought across a chest,—I don’t mean with pistols, but with good honest fisty-cuffs. The only difficulty attending this method of settling such matters consisted in the shifts to which the parties were compelled to resort, to conceal the black eyes which, in most cases, were the result of these single combats. It would, of course, have been quite incorrect in the commanding officer to have overlooked such proceedings—even supposing the parties to retain a sufficiency of optics to do their duty. The usual resource was to trust to the good-nature of the surgeon, who put the high contending partieson the sick list, and wrote against their names “Contusion;” an entry he might certainly make with a safe conscience!
This innocent way of settling disputes was all very well, so long as the mids were really and truly boys; but there came, in process of time, a plaguy awkward age, when they began to fancy themselves men, and when they were very apt to take it into their heads that, on such occasions as that just alluded to, their dignity, as officers and gentlemen, would be compromised by beating one another about the face and eyes across a chest, and otherwise contusing one another, according to the most approved fashion of the cock-pit. Youths, at this intermediate age, are called Hobbledehoys, that is, neither man nor boy. And as powder and ball act with equal efficacy against these high-spirited fellows as against men of more experience, fatal duels do sometimes take place even amongst midshipmen. I was once present at a very foolish affair of this kind, which, though it happily ended in smoke, was so exceedingly irregular in all its parts, that, had any onefallen, the whole party concerned would most probably have been hanged!
A dispute arose between three of these young men, in the course of which, terms were bandied about, leaving a reproach such that only the ordeal of a duel, it was thought, could wipe out. It was late in the day when this quarrel took place; but as there was still light enough left to fire a shot, the party went on deck, and quietly asked leave to go on shore for a walk. I happened to be the only person in the birth at the time who was not engaged in the squabble, and so was pressed into the service of the disputants to act as second. There would have been nothing very absurd in all this, had there been another second besides me, or had there existed only one quarrel to settle—but between the three youths there were two distinct disputes!
One of these lads, whom we shall call Mr. A, had first to fight with Mr. B, while Mr. C was second to Mr. B; and then Mr. A, having disposed of Mr. B, either by putting him out of the world, or by adjusting thematter by apologies, was to commence a fresh battle with Mr. C, who, it will be observed, had been second to his former antagonist, Mr. B! The contingency of Mr. A himself being put hors de combat appears not to have been contemplated; but the strong personal interest which Mr. C (the second to Mr. A’s first antagonist) had in giving the affair a fatal turn, would have been the ticklish point for our poor necks, in a court of justice, had Mr. A fallen. Poor fellow! he was afterwards killed in action.
More by good luck than good management, neither of the first shots took effect. At this stage of the affair, I began to perceive the excessive absurdity of the whole transaction, and the danger of the gallows, to which we were all exposing ourselves. I therefore vehemently urged upon the parties the propriety of staying further proceedings. These suggestions were fortunately strengthened by the arrival of a corporal’s guard of armed marines from the ship, under the orders of an officer, who was directed to arrest the whole party. There was at first aludicrous shew of actual resistance to this detachment; but, after some words, the affair terminated, and the disputants walked off the field arm in arm, the best friends in the world!