Chapter 17

AWAY! SECOND, THIRD, AND FOURTH CUTTERS, AWAY!

It was the morning succeeding one of these _general quarters_
that we picked up a life-buoy, descried floating by.

It was a circular mass of cork, about eight inches thick and four
feet in diameter, covered with tarred canvas. All round its
circumference there trailed a number of knotted ropes'-ends,
terminating in fanciful Turks' heads. These were the life-lines,
for the drowning to clutch. Inserted into the middle of the cork
was an upright, carved pole, somewhat shorter than a pike-staff.
The whole buoy was embossed with barnacles, and its sides
festooned with sea-weeds. Dolphins were sporting and flashing
around it, and one white bird was hovering over the top of the
pole. Long ago, this thing must have been thrown over-board to
save some poor wretch, who must have been drowned; while even the
life-buoy itself had drifted away out of sight.

The forecastle-men fished it up from the bows, and the seamen
thronged round it.

"Bad luck! bad luck!" cried the Captain of the Head; "we'll
number one less before long."

The ship's cooper strolled by; he, to whose department it belongs
to see that the ship's life-buoys are kept in good order.

In men-of-war, night and day, week in and week out, two life-
buoys are kept depending from the stern; and two men, with
hatchets in their hands, pace up and down, ready at the first cry
to cut the cord and drop the buoys overboard. Every two hours
they are regularly relieved, like sentinels on guard. No similar
precautions are adopted in the merchant or whaling service.

Thus deeply solicitous to preserve human life are the regulations
of men-of-war; and seldom has there been a better illustration of
this solicitude than at the battle of Trafalgar, when, after
"several thousand" French seamen had been destroyed, according
to Lord Collingwood, and, by the official returns, sixteen
hundred and ninety Englishmen were killed or wounded, the
Captains of the surviving ships ordered the life-buoy sentries
from their death-dealing guns to their vigilant posts, as
officers of the Humane Society.

"There, Bungs!" cried Scrimmage, a sheet-anchor-man,[2] "there's
a good pattern for you; make us a brace of life-buoys like that;
something that will save a man, and not fill and sink under him,
as those leaky quarter-casks of yours will the first time there's
occasion to drop 'ern. I came near pitching off the bowsprit the
other day; and, when I scrambled inboard again, I went aft to get
a squint at 'em. Why, Bungs, they are all open between the
staves. Shame on you! Suppose you yourself should fall over-
board, and find yourself going down