Chapter 27

SOME THOUGHTS GROWING OUT OF MAD JACK'S COUNTERMANDING HIS
SUPERIOR'S ORDER.

In time of peril, like the needle to the loadstone, obedience,
irrespective of rank, generally flies to him who is best fitted
to command. The truth of this seemed evinced in the case of Mad
Jack, during the gale, and especially at that perilous moment
when he countermanded the Captain's order at the helm. But every
seaman knew, at the time, that the Captain's order was an unwise
one in the extreme; perhaps worse than unwise.

These two orders given, by the Captain and his Lieutenant,
exactly contrasted their characters. By putting the helm _hard
up_, the Captain was for _scudding_; that is, for flying away
from the gale. Whereas, Mad Jack was for running the ship into
its teeth. It is needless to say that, in almost all cases of
similar hard squalls and gales, the latter step, though attended
with more appalling appearances is, in reality, the safer of the
two, and the most generally adopted.

Scudding makes you a slave to the blast, which drives you headlong
before it; but _running up into the wind's eye_ enables you, in a
degree, to hold it at bay. Scudding exposes to the gale your stern,
the weakest part of your hull; the contrary course presents to it your
bows, your strongest part. As with ships, so with men; he who turns his
back to his foe gives him an advantage. Whereas, our ribbed chests, like
the ribbed bows of a frigate, are as bulkheads to dam off an onset.

That night, off the pitch of the Cape, Captain Claret was hurried forth
from his disguises, and, at a manhood-testing conjuncture, appeared in
his true colours. A thing which every man in the ship had long suspected
that night was proved true. Hitherto, in going about the ship, and
casting his glances among the men, the peculiarly lustreless repose of
the Captain's eye--his slow, even, unnecessarily methodical step, and
the forced firmness of his whole demeanour--though, to a casual observer,
expressive of the consciousness of command and a desire to strike
subjection among the crew--all this, to some minds, had only been deemed
indications of the fact that Captain Claret, while carefully shunning
positive excesses, continually kept himself in an uncertain equilibrio
between soberness and its reverse; which equilibrio might be destroyed
by the first sharp vicissitude of events.

And though this is only a surmise, nevertheless, as having some
knowledge of brandy and mankind, White-Jacket will venture to state
that, had Captain Claret been an out-and-out temperance man, he would
never have given that most imprudent order to _hard up_ the helm. He
would either have held his peace, and stayed in his cabin, like his
gracious majesty the