Chapter LXII - Page 2

gun or fought a battle in his life. When I knew
him on board the Ajax, he was seventy-two years old and had plowed the
salt water sixty-one of them. For sixteen years he had gone in and out
of the harbor of Honolulu in command of a whaleship, and for sixteen more
had been captain of a San Francisco and Sandwich Island passenger packet
and had never had an accident or lost a vessel. The simple natives knew
him for a friend who never failed them, and regarded him as children
regard a father. It was a dangerous thing to oppress them when the
roaring Admiral was around.

Two years before I knew the Admiral, he had retired from the sea on a
competence, and had sworn a colossal nine-jointed oath that he would
"never go within smelling distance of the salt water again as long as he
lived." And he had conscientiously kept it. That is to say, he
considered he had kept it, and it would have been more than dangerous to
suggest to him, even in the gentlest way, that making eleven long sea
voyages, as a passenger, during the two years that had transpired since
he "retired," was only keeping the general spirit of it and not the
strict letter.

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