Chapter 19

"The world's all title-page; there's no contents;
The world's all face; the man who shows his heart,
Is hooted for his nudities, and scorned."

_Night Thoughts_

Bolt had not been tried. His case had several serious difficulties, and
the orders allowed of a discretion. The punishment could scarcely be
less than death, and, in addition to the loss of a stout, sinewy man, it
involved questions of natural right, that were not always pleasant to be
considered. Although the impressment of American seamen into the British
ships of war was probably one of the most serious moral as well as
political wrongs that one independent nation ever received at the hands
of another, viewed as a practice of a generation's continuance it was
not wholly without some relieving points. There was a portion of the
British marine that disdained to practise it at all; leaving it to the
coarser spirits of the profession to discharge a duty that they
themselves found repugnant to their feelings and their habits. Thus, we
remember to have heard an American seaman say, one who had been present
on many occasions when his countrymen were torn from under their flag,
that in no instance he ever witnessed was the officer who committed the
wrong of an air and manner that he should describe as belonging to the
class of gentlemen on shore. Whenever one of the latter boarded his
vessel, the crew was permitted to pass unquestioned.

Let this be as it might, there is no question that a strong and generous
feeling existed in the breasts of hundreds in the British navy,
concerning the nature of the wrong that was done a foreign people, by
the practice of impressing men from under their flag. Although Cuffe was
too much of a martinet to carry his notions on the subject to a very
refined point, he was too much of a man not to be reluctant to punish
another for doing what he felt he would have done himself, under similar
circumstances, and what he could not but know he would have had a
perfect right to do. It was impossible to mistake one like Ithuel, who
had so many of the Granite peculiarities about him, for anything but
what he was; and so well was his national character established in the
ship, that the _sobriquet_ of The Yankee had been applied to him by his
shipmates from the very first. The fact, therefore, stood him so far in
hand that Cuffe, after a consultation with Winchester, determined not to
put the alleged deserter on trial; but, after letting him remain a short
time in irons, to turn him to duty again, under a pretence that was
often used on such occasions, viz., to give the man an opportunity of
proving his American birth, if he were really what he so strenuously
professed to be. Poor Ithuel was not the only one who