Chapter 52

SOMETHING CONCERNING MIDSHIPMEN.

It was the next morning after matchless Jack's interview with the
Commodore and Captain, that a little incident occurred, soon
forgotten by the crew at large, but long remembered by the few
seamen who were in the habit of closely scrutinising every-day
proceedings. Upon the face of it, it was but a common event--at
least in a man-of-war--the flogging of a man at the gangway. But
the under-current of circumstances in the case were of a nature
that magnified this particular flogging into a matter of no
small importance. The story itself cannot here be related; it
would not well bear recital: enough that the person flogged was a
middle-aged man of the Waist--a forlorn, broken-down, miserable
object, truly; one of those wretched landsmen sometimes driven
into the Navy by their unfitness for all things else, even as
others are driven into the workhouse. He was flogged at the
complaint of a midshipman; and hereby hangs the drift of the
thing. For though this waister was so ignoble a mortal, yet his
being scourged on this one occasion indirectly proceeded from the
mere wanton spite and unscrupulousness of the midshipman in
question--a youth, who was apt to indulge at times in undignified
familiarities with some of the men, who, sooner or later, almost
always suffered from his capricious preferences.

But the leading principle that was involved in this affair is far too
mischievous to be lightly dismissed.

In most cases, it would seem to be a cardinal principle with a Navy
Captain that his subordinates are disintegrated parts of himself,
detached from the main body on special service, and that the order of
the minutest midshipman must be as deferentially obeyed by the seamen
as if proceeding from the Commodore on the poop. This principle was
once emphasised in a remarkable manner by the valiant and handsome
Sir Peter Parker, upon whose death, on a national arson expedition on
the shores of Chesapeake Bay, in 1812 or 1813, Lord Byron wrote his
well-known stanzas. "By the god of war!" said Sir Peter to his sailors,
"I'll make you touch your hat to a midshipman's coat, if it's only
hung on a broomstick to dry!"

That the king, in the eye of the law, can do no wrong, is the well-
known fiction of despotic states; but it has remained for the navies
of Constitutional Monarchies and Republics to magnify this fiction,
by indirectly extending it to all the quarter-deck subordinates of an
armed ship's chief magistrate. And though judicially unrecognised, and
unacknowledged by the officers themselves, yet this is the principle
that pervades the fleet; this is the principle that is every hour
acted upon, and to sustain which, thousands of seamen