THE GREENWICH PENSIONER
A Greenwichpensioner! Did any of my readers ever ponder on that strange composition of battered humanity and blue serge? Did they never feel a something approaching very near gratitude on passing, in the metropolis, a Greenwich pensioner, who, with his honest, carved out, unabashed front, looks as bluntly and as wonderingly at the bustle and splendour around him as does an unsophisticated wether suddenly removed from South Downs to Cheapside, whilst shaking his woollen coat beneath the whip of the coachman to the Lord Mayor. What a mixture of gravity and wonderment is in the poor brute’s countenance! how with its meek, uplifted head it stares at the effulgent vehicle,—runs leaping at the coach-wheels, mistaking them for hurdles,—falls, awe-struck, back, at the gilt and beavered greatness of the footman’s cocked hat,—then, suddenly awakened from its amazement by the lurcher’s teeth, or the driver’s stick, makes an unlucky spring of some threefeet into the air, catches a glance of its figure in the mirrored walls of a silk mercer, and, startled at the sight, dashes through the first court,—carrying perhaps a few yards upon its back some red-faced, nankeen-gaitered little stockbroker, whose spattered small clothes are for a time unregarded in the mighty rush of drovers, butchers, dogs, and idlers.
Now such is the real Greenwich pensioner. When I sayreal, I mean one who abhors London worse than he does a Frenchman; who thinks there is nothing to be seen in it, unless, indeed, it be Nelson’s tomb, in St Paul’s, or the “Ship” public-house, in Tooley Street. London is to him a never-failing source of merriment; that is, whilst he is out of it. He sits at Greenwich, and looking as sagely as a starling ere he snaps at a fly, at the piled-up clouds of smoke hanging over the metropolis, or, indeed, almost propped upon its chimney-pots, and, stretching forth his stick, significantly points them out to his former shipmates, asking them if they do not think “there is something dark over there—something of an ‘ox-eye’ to the west?” He, indeed, never ventures to London, unless it be for a fresh supply of tobacco, or to pay a quarterly visit to his grand-daughter, the upper housemaid in a gentleman’s family,—and who, indeed, thinks with horror upon his call, because the neighbours laugh at the cocked hat and the shoe-buckles of her relative; but principally because Richard, the baker’s young man, declares he hates all sailors. The visit is never a very lengthened one, especially if the girl lives far to the west; for her grandfather has to call upon Will Somebody, who set up, with his prize-money, a public-house in Wapping. So off he starts, hurries up the Strand, touches his hat from a point of principle as he nears Somerset House; puts out more canvas, and away for Temple Bar. The pensioner has not yet, however, sat for his picture.
We have all read of crabs being despoiled of their claws, locusts of their entrails, and turtles of their brains, receiving in lieu thereof a pellet of cotton, and yet retaining life, and appearing, in the words of the experimentalising and soft-hearted naturalist, “very lively and comfortable.”[10]Now, the real Greenwich pensioner distances all these; he is, indeed, an enigma: nature knows not what to make of him. He hath been suspended, like a school-boy’s bob-cherry, a hundred times over the chaps of death, and yet still been snatched away by the hand of Providence—to whom, indeed, his many hurts and dangers have especially endeared him. Ye of the “landinterest,” ye soft-faced young sparks, who think with terror upon a razor on a frosty morning,—ye suffering old gentlemen, who pause at a linen-draper’s, and pass the flannel between your fingers, as time verges towards October—ye martyrs to a winter cough, ye racked with a quarterly toothache—all ye of household ailings, look upon this hacked, shivered piece of clay, this Greenwich pensioner:—consider of how many of his powers he is despoiled—see where the cutlass and the boarding-spike have ploughed up and pierced his flesh; see where the bullet has glanced, singeing by; and when you have reckoned up—if they are to be reckoned—his many scars, above all, look at his hard, contented, weather-barnacled face, and then, gentle spectators, complain of your rheums, your joint-twitchings, and your corns!
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Why, this Greenwich pensioner is in himself a record of the last forty years’ war. He is a breathing volume of naval history: not an event but is somewhere indented in him with steel or lead: he has been the stick in which the English Mars has notched his cricket matches, when twenty-four pounders were balls, and mainmasts wickets. See, in his blinded eye is Howe’s victory on the glorious First of June; that stump of what was once an arm is Nile;and in his wooden leg read Trafalgar. As to his scars, a gallant action, or a desperate cutting out is noted in every one of them. And what was the old fellow’s only wish, as with a shattered knee he lay in the cock-pit under the surgeon’s hand—what was his earnest supplication to the wet-eyed messmate who bore him down the hatchway? Simply that he would save him one of the splinters of the mainmast of theVictory, to make of it a leg for Sundays! His wish was granted; and at Greenwich, always on the seventh day, and also on the 21st of October, is he to be seen, propped upon the inestimable splinter, which from labour, time, and beeswax, has taken the dark glossiness of mahogany. What a face he has! What a certain consciousness of his superiority on his own element at times puffs out his lip, and gives a sudden twitch to his head! But ask him in what quarter sets the wind—and note, how with his one eye he will glance at you from top to toe; and, without ever raising his head or hand to make a self-inquiry, answers you at once, as though it was a question he was already prepared for! And so, indeed, he is; it being his first business, on rising, to consult the weather. The only way to gain his entire confidence, is at once frankly to avow your utter ignorance, and his superiority; and then, after he has leered at you with an eye in which there is a meeting of contempt, good-humour, and self-importance, he is wholly your own; and will straightway launch into the South Seas, coast along the shores of Guinea,—where, by-the-bye, he will tell you he once fell in love with a negress, who, however, jilted him for the cook—and then he will launch out about Admiral Duncan—take you a voyage with him round Cape Horn, where a mermaid appeared, and sang a song to the ship’s crew; and who, indeed, blew aside all the musket shots that were ungallantly fired at her in requital of her melody. But our pensioner has one particular story; hear him through that, suffer yourself to be wholly astounded atits recital, and, if you were not a landsman, he would instantly greet you as his dearest friend. The heroes of this same story are, our pensioner and a shark: a tremendous shark that used to be the terror of the harbour of St Thomas’s. Upon this shark, and the piece of the mainmast of theVictory, is our pensioner content to rest all his importance during his life, and his fame with posterity. He will tell you that he, being caterer of the mess, let fall a piece of beef out at the port-hole, which this terrible shark received into its jaws, and twisted its body most provokingly at the delicious mouthful. Hereupon our pensioner—it was before, he reminds you, he had lost a limb—asks leave of the first lieutenant (for the captain was ashore) to have a bout with the shark: leave being granted, all the crew are quickly in the shrouds, and upon the hammock netting, to see Tom “tackle the shark.” Our pensioner now enters into a minute detail of how, having armed himself with a long knife, he jumped overboard, dived under the shark, whom he saw approaching with distended jaws, and inflicted a tremendous wound with the knife in the belly of the fish; this is repeated thrice, when the shark turns itself upon its back—a boat is let down, and both the conqueror and the conquered are quickly received upon deck. You are doubtless astonished at this; he, however, adds to your surprise by telling you that the mess regaled off the piece of beef recovered from the fish; be more astounded at this, although mingle no doubt in your astonishment, and he will straightway promise some day to treat your eyes with a sight of a set of chequer men, cut from the very dorsal bone of the immolated shark! To be the hearer of a sailor’s tale is something like undergoing the ancient ordeal of red-hot ploughshares; be innocent of unbelief, and you may, as was held, journey in safety; doubt the smallest point, and you are quickly withered into nought.
What an odd contrast to his early life is the state of aGreenwich pensioner! It is as though a part of the angry and foaming sea should lie stagnant in a bathing tub. All his business is to recount his former adventures—to plod about, and look with a disdainful eye at trees and bricks and mortar; or, when he would indulge in a serious fit of spleen, to walk down to the river’s side, and let his gall feed upon the mishaps of London apprentices, who, fearless of consequences, may have ventured some five miles from home innota “trim-built wherry.” A Greenwich pensioner fresh from sea is a most preposterous creature; he gets up every morning for a week, a month, and still finds himself in the same place; he knows not what to make of it—he feels the strangeness of his situation, and would, had he the patience and the wit, liken himself to a hundred unsettled things. Compare him to a hippopotamus in a gentleman’s park, and he would tell you he had in his day seen a hippopotamus, and then, with a good-natured grunt, acquiesce in the resemblance; or to a jolly-boat in a flower garden; or to a sea-gull in the cage of a canary; or to a porpoise upon a hearthrug; or to a boatswain’s whistle in a nursery; or to a marling-spike in a milliner’s workroom; or a tar-barrel in a confectioner’s; with any one or all of these misplaced articles would our unsettled pensioner sympathise, until time shall have reconciled him to his asylum; and even then his fancy, like the shells upon our mantelpiece, will sound of the distant and the dangerous ocean. At Greenwich, however, the mutilated old sailor has time enough to indulge in the recollection of his early days, and, with what wisdom he may, to make up his mind to meet in another world those whom his arm may have sent thither long before. Death, at length, gently lays the veteran upon his back—his last words, as the sailor puts his withered hand upon his heart, are “All’s well,” and sea and earth have passed away. His body, which had been for forty years a bulwark to the land, now demands of it but “twopaces of the vilest earth”; and if aught could spring from the tomb characteristic of its inmate, from the grave of the pensioner would arise the stout, unbending oak—it would be his fitting monument; and the carolling of the birds in its branches would be his loud, his artless epitaph.
The Greenwich pensioner, wherever we meet with him, is a fine, quaint memento of our national greatness, and our fortunate locality. We should look upon him as the representative of Neptune, and bend our spirit towards him accordingly. But that is not sufficient; we have individual acknowledgments to make to him for the comforts of a long safety. Let us but consider, as we look at his wooden supporter, that if it had not been for his leg the cannon-ball might have scattered us in our tea parlour—the bullet which deprived him of his orb of vision might have strickenOur Villagefrom our hand whilst ensconced in our study; the cutlass which cleaved his shoulder might have demolished our china vase, or our globe of golden fish:—instead of which, hemmed round by such walls of stout and honest flesh, we have lived securely, participating in every peaceful and domestic comfort, and neither heard the roar of the cannon nor seen its smoke. Shakespeare has compared England to “a swan’s nest” in the “world’s pool”: let us be nautical in our similes, and liken her to a single lemon kernel in a huge bowl of punch: who is it that has prevented the kernel from being ladled down the throat of despotism, from becoming but an atom of the great, loathsome mass?—our Greenwich pensioner. Who has kept our houses from being transformed into barracks and our cabbage markets into parades?—again, and again, let it be answered, the Greenwich pensioner. Reader, if the next time you see the tar, you should perchance have with you your wife and smiling family, think that if their tenderness has never been shocked by scenes of blood and terror, you owe such quietude to a Greenwich pensioner. Indeed, I know notif a triennial progress of the Greenwich establishment through the whole kingdom would not be attended with the most beneficial effects—fathers would teach their little ones to lisp thanksgivings unto God that they were born in England, as reminded of their happy superiority by the withered form of every Greenwich pensioner.