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represent. He would not venture on shipboard-except it were in the mess he belongs to, a mess composed of young gentlemen not much unlike himself in their general attributes and qualifications to densely garnish his to densely garnish his conversation with nautical flourishes, for the "real salts" would contemptuously silence him forthwith. The fact is, he has picked up his sea-lingo by assiduously committing to memory every slang and technical sea-phrase that he has heard, and he does not even understand the meaning of much that he parrots. Once for all, let the reader note the instructive fact, that blue-jacketed heroes who cannot utter a single sentence ashore without "shivering their timbers," and that sort of slang, are generally know-nothings and horse-marines. We should not have devoted so much space to sketch Mr. Fitz-Osborne, were it not that we believe him to be the type of a rather numerous class of worthless scamps in the navy.

Gladly do we turn to another "representative man," a worthy personal friend of our own, Jack Treenail,* carpenter's mate, a rating he has held longer than he need have done, had he been desirous of rising in the service, as we shall presently show. Jack is a middle-sized, muscular fellow, good-looking, and in the prime of life, although, like most seamen-and he is a good seaman as well as carpenter— who have seen much hard service, he appears older than he actually is. He is a Scotchman, of respectable family, and served his apprenticeship to a ship-builder. He was naturally of a roving disposition, and soon after his term expired, he chose to enter a mano'-war, and has served in the navy ever since. He is an extremely intelligent fellow, and relates his experiences of life in a very clear, modest, sensible, and graphic manner; and much has he seen and undergone. He served four or five years in the East Indies, and several years on the African coast and in the West Indies, and terrible reminiscences are his of those deadly stations. His iron constitution has borne him through all, though more than once his life was not worth an hour's purchase. Awful narratives can he give of the "pestilence which walk

eth by noon-day," ay, and in the watches of the night, too, for that matter. He has seen strong men smitten down by dozens, and by scores, and in the space of a very few hours hurriedly committed to the deep by messmates whose own turn would come ere sunrise. He has beheld as many marvels, experienced as many dangers, endured as many hardships, and, we fear we must add, shared in as many follies, as usually fall to the lot of meno'-war's-men. Withal, he has ever done his duty to the satisfaction of his officers, and has rated many years as carpenter's mate. Repeatedly has he had an opportunity of obtaining a warrant as carpenter; but promotion he has shunned, for reasons which we smiled to hear him mention, although we questioned not his sincerity. Strange as it may appear, that a man, whom we believe to be every way competent for a higher rating, should refuse to accept it, yet we know that such is the positive fact. Being a first-rate swimmer, our friend Jack never hesitates to risk his life to save that of others; and he has ere now been specially noticed by the admiral, and by his orders thanked and commended on the quarter-deck, for his heroic conduct, in the presence of the assembled ship's crew; yet, a warrant by way of reward he even then sturdily refused to receive! Nearly all men gladly accept promotion when offered, and few, indeed, like Jack, decline it resolutely, yet not ungratefully. But he has an ample reward in the consciousness of doing his duty, and being respected and esteemed by his officers and shipmates. He likes the service, too, and should his life be so far prolonged, never means to quit it until the time comes when he will be honestly entitled to a good retiring pension; nor will he even quit it then, if his country requires his services. A noble contrast is brave, manly Jack Treenail to the contemptible rascal whom we previously sketched; and glad are we to be able to add, that although there may be only too many of the Fitz-Osborne genus in the navy, there are yet more of the Jack Treenail class-hearts of oak to the back-bone, the living bulwark of their country in time of danger!

Now for one who deserves an

The name is, of course, fictitious, but all we have said of the man himself is matter-of-fact.

elaborate, full-length portrait, rather than the imperfect outline sketch which we can here afford him. Marmaduke Winter is the oldest man on board the ship; no wonder that the seamen call him, half in joke, half in kindly earnest, "Old Daddy Neptune." An artist would, indeed, at once acknowledge him to be a singularly fine model of the imaginary god of the sea, only minus the conventional beard. He is sixty-five years of age, yet on an emergency he can exhibit as much activity and strength as many seamen in their prime. He has been very tall, and proportionately stout, but now his back is considerably bowed, and his frame is thin; yet it is indurated to such a degree as to defy all elemental warfare-no exposure nor hardship can materially affect it. His countenance must once have been singularly handsome, and even now the regular features have a fine genial expression; but the brown skin is wrinkled and puckered; the blue eyes still clear and bright, are deeply sunk in their sockets; and the bushy eyebrows above them, and the long tangled hair growing around the throat, are as white as the salt-sea foam. The fore and upper part of his head is quite bald, but the back is thickly clustered with hoary locks. We defy any one of sensibility or imagination to behold without emotion this venerable mariner, as he stands on the forecastle, motionless as the mast, his withered hands calmly folded across his breast, gazing over the heaving waters of the main with an air of melancholy abstraction, as though in fancy he traces on the horizon the shadowy semblances of ships in which he sailed in years long bygone—ay, and perchance peoples their decks with the forms of messmates, whose bones bleached in ocean's depths a generation ago. Old Marmaduke is a "sheet-anchor-man," a veteran "leading seaman," whose station is the forecastle; and if it be asked why and wherefore one like him is not a petty oflicer of long standing, we are constrained to answer, that quiet and dignified as he now is, he has been, both in youth, prime, and middle-age, as reckless a seamen as ever broke biscuit; and, moreover, he can neither read nor write. But when he felt frosty old age insidiously approaching, he suddenly bade adieu for ever to the

follies and the vices which had so long held him in thraldom, and for several years past he has been a steady, sober, thoughtful," ancient mariner." He is a sort of privileged character on board, made much of by the men, kindly spoken to by the officers, and idolised by the younger midshipmen, whom he delights by quaint and marvellous legends, and patiently instructs -with the aid of a couple of fathoms of "white line "-how to make double diamond - knots, Turk's - heads, Carrick - bends, round - seizings, long. splices, sheepshanks, Matthew Walkers, and all other sorts of knots, bends, hitches, and splices, simple and intri. cate, common and uncommon fir none are unknown to him. He is t best spinner of yarns in the ship, a formerly was noted for the richly h morous nature of the majority of his "twisters," but of late all the stories he tells are of a very sad, doleful, lugubrious, or preternatural cast, and he fails not to intersperse them with words of solemn admonition, for the benefit of the young seamen who on such occasions eagerly group around him; and, assuredly, he speaks from long and bitter experience, when he warns them to steer clear of the rocks and quick. sands which have proved fatal to countless thousands of their class.

What scenes hath this hoary seaman beheld! What a long retrospective vista of vanished years can he look through! His history is very similar so that of many other old sea-dogs. He ran away from his humble home, and went to sea at twelve years of age; and when he returned a young man, his parents and relatives were all dead or scattered, and never did he behold one of them again. His earliest years of sea-life were spent in Liverpool slaversa school only s single degree less iniquitous than pi racy. Then he became privateersman, and, as he sometimes darkly hints, at one period was of a worse profession than either. Fifty-three years has he followed the sea in one kind of vessel or other-sometimes in merchantmen, sometimes in whalers, sometimes in yachts, but more frequently in the navy; and the mere catalogue of the names of the countries and the ports he has visited, would mightily resem ble the index to an atlas so far as the sea-coast is concerned. He has long outlived nearly every one of the

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messmates and shipmates of his youth and manhood-for seamen, who regularly follow their arduous profession, are worn out at a premature age-and he believes there does not exist a single human being with whom he can claim kindred. Who will marvel, therefore, that his heart clings tenaciously to the memory of the past all sin-spotted, and melancholy, and suggestive of at least a partially misspent life, though that memory be? He is, like nearly all old seamen, decidedly bigoted, and will never admit that better ships, or better seamen, than he sailed with in Nelson's time, do now, or ever will, float in blue water. One other characteristic we must not omit to mention; he cannot for a moment bear it to be thought that he, Marmaduke Winter, is not yet perfectly able to do duty as well as any seaman in the ship. If the officers kindly wish to spare him exposure to the elements, or any very severe labour or exertion requiring the energies of a man in the prime of life, he indiguantly repudiates the infe

rence.

"Three kings of England have I sarved," growls he, "and I can yet sarve the Queen as well as ever I sarved them as reigned afore her !”

Truly he retains his physical powers in a marvellous degree; but the time probably is not far distant when the tough old mariner will at last be fain to confess that aged seamen, as well as aged ships, must be laid up in ordinary-the former at Greenwich, the latter wherever my Lords of the Admiralty in their wisdom shall appoint.

But perhaps it may be the lot of Marmaduke Winter to die at sea, and he has oft expressed a wish that such should be the fitting end of his career. In that case his body will be conveyed from the "sick-bay" (or hospital of the ship) to the berth-deck, where it will be placed on the death-board, between two of the guns, near the hatchway. The sailmakers then will sew it in its canvas-shroud, with a couple of heavy cannon-balls securely attached to the feet. This done, the corpse will be carried to the upper-deck, and placed on a grating in the lee-waist, with the union-jack for a pall. The end of the grating projects in a slanting direction through a porthole. Simple, yet ominous, preparations these! At the appointed time, the entire crew is sum

moned, and the officers group round the grating. The chaplain then, whilst all hands stand bareheaded, reads the Burial service. When the solemn words, "We commit his body to the sea," are slowly uttered, the flag is drawn off the corpse, and the grating launched bodily overboard, the body sliding off, and plunging downward, feet foremost. There is a hissing splash, a momentary eddy, a few air bubbles-that is all! Farewell, poor old Marmaduke, your messmates and shipmates have seen the last of you! All is now over; the grating is hauled on board again; Mr. Blowhard, the boatswain, pipes the hands down, and the crew disperse. That evening, his own immediate messmates, the sheetanchor-men, will talk about the qualities of the defunct, as they sit over their six o'clock supper, and miss him from his accustomed seat; and for a few days anecdotes will occasionally be related concerning his sayings and doings; but in a brief period he will be almost forgotten, for sailors don't indulge in the "luxury of grief" and sentimental recollections, nor do they much like for their thoughts to revert to, and dwell on a deceased messmate, since they too well know how slight, humanly speaking, is the thread which hourly holds them from destruction, and how soon his fate may be theirs, and, therefore, they shun all gloomy and saddening thoughts. Next day the purser will probably enter on his books the initials "D. D." (Discharged-Dead) opposite the name of Marmaduke Winter, and that will be the old tar's epitaph!

Well, we can conceive no more fitting shroud for a seaman than his own hammock, and no more appropriate grave than the free, boundless ocean, on which his life has been spent, and where the wild, viewless winds and green curling waves will sing his requiem! The ocean is a sublime tomb; and what thorough-bred seamen would not prefer for his mortal remains to quietly dissolve in its coral caves, rather than to fester in some sweltering city Golgotha? Ay, give the gallant soldier his six feet of the earth, whereon he has ever been accustomed to martially tread, but give poor Jack the wide ocean for his sepulchre, with nought above his breast but the ever-rolling blue salt waves!

Next we will introduce George

Blunt, quartermaster, a man who is a tolerably fair representative of his own class of petty officers, one or more specimens of which class, by-the-by, figure prominently in most naval novels. Nor do we wonder at this, for a quartermaster usually is a fine old sea-dog; indeed, the mere fact that he holds such a rating is a certain proof that he is an experienced, trustworthy, and particularly able and intelligent seaman. You could hardly look at our quartermaster, whether on duty standing at the wheel, or at the con, or on the lookout, glass in hand, or off duty, with a very different kind of glass in hand, without being somehow reminded of the British oak, of which he seems a sort of human similitude. His feet are the roots, his sturdy body is the trunk, his arms are the branches, his head is the crown; his whole aspect is hardy, powerful, defiant of tempest and of time. He is below the standard height, very square built, and furnished with limbs of prodigious strength. His age may be well on to fifty, but his activity is unimpaired, and his frame was never more capable of standing the severest tests of endurance than at the present time. His features are bluff, weather-beaten, and dogmatic; yet have withal kindly lines, and are capable of assuming, on occasion, a droll and humorous expression. He is the oracle of his own mess, and the scamen listen with deference to his professional remarks, and grin with a keen relish at his somewhat coarse, yet often capital jokes. He is a great favourite, too, with the mates and oldsters of the midshipmen's mess; and when a junior-lieutenant has the watch, that gentleman is pretty sure to find occasion to avail himself in an off-hand way seemingly half-indifferent, yet really serious and anxious-of the experience of the grizzled quartermaster, whose respectful advice he condescendingly adopts, and rewards with an order for the gun-room steward to give old Blunt a stiff nor'-wester! And what is old Blunt's personal history? An ordinary one for a man of his class, yet not uninstructive, had we space to go into into detail. He is a native of North Shields, and at a very early age embarked in the same profession that his father and grandfather had followed before him, namely, was apprenticed to a collier-brig. The Northumber

land collier-vessels have long and justly been deemed an excellent nursery for the British navy, and young Blunt proved one of these nurselings. He was thankful to exchange the proverbially hard berth of a seaman in a collier, for the comparatively easy life of a topman in one of his namesake George's ships of war; and he has never quitted the navy. He has sailed in all sorts of vessels, from a cutter to a three-decker; he has visited every quarter of the globe, and professes to have acquired a thorough knowledge of all foreign countries and foreign peo ples, although the truth is, he never in his life penetrated a couple of miles inland anywhere, and all his intercours with whites, blacks, browns, tawng copper-skins, and woolly-heads, has been strictly confined to the precincts of dockyards, wharves, and sailors' taverns his liveliest reminiscences of foreign customs and manners being inalienably associated with the latter intellectual places of resort—which are, to be sure, exceedingly interesting and instructive in their way, as we can testify.

Decidedly the most unpopular cha racter in the ship is the distinguished individual whom we now deferentially introduce as Jonathan Ferret, masterat-arins a gentleman who is held in mingled fear and dislike by all hands. And, indeed, we do not greatly marvel that a master-at-arms should thus be regarded by the crew, ex-officio, altogether independent of his personal qua lities; and these, alas! in the case of our present friend, are not of the most estimable kind. Of the past history of Jonathan Ferret we are profoundly ignorant. The seamen can supply you with at least a score of ready cut-anddry biographies of their master-at-arms, tracing his career from ship to ship, back even to that early period when, as one of them asserts, Jonathan and some juvenile companions robbed or chards and old women's gingerbreadstalls, until impunity emboldened them to make a daring midnight foray in a farmer's homestead, where they bagged poultry galore, and narrowly escaped being bagged themselves, which pricked the tender conscience of young Jona than to such a degree, that he turned King's evidence the next morning, and his comrades were sent to prison, and he was sent to sea. We regard this as an apocryphal mode of accounting

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for the professional origin of the mas ter-at-arms, and we think the same of the score or more of current histories of that personage, as no two of them agree in detail, although it is noteworthy, that one and all of them depict their hero as a consummate scoundrel, and explain his official position on the principle that an old poacher makes a good gamekeeper, and an old thief a good gaoler. In person, the masterat-arms is a tall, hard-featured, cadaverous, middle-aged man, obsequious to the officers, and domineering and unrelenting to the men. They dread and detest him, because he is an official ever on the watch to bring them to punishment; but that is his especial duty, for he is head-constable and gaoler of the ship, and has two underlings, who are called ship's corporals. Night and day, in all weathers, all times, all places, these vigilant officials are on the look-out to detect offenders, and bring them before the magnate of the quarter-deck for the time being, to answer for their misdeeds. The seamen well know that the watchful eye of either the master-at-arms or that of one of his aids is ever upon them. But for this ubiquitous functionary, and his equally ubiquitous myrmidons, there would be comparatively a merry, lawless time on the berth and maindecks. As it is, the master-at-arms is indefatigable in detecting secret gambling and misdemeanours of all kinds. The evildoer must be very shrewd and wideawake indeed to escape the cognizance of the police of the ship, or of their sneaking spies (invariably the vilest and most scoundrelly of the crew), and the instant he is detected in any illegal or forbidden act whatsoever, the master-at-arms pounces upon him-grimly gleeful and hauls him before the powers that be; and, according to the nature of the offence, he is either summarily punished, or is placed in irons in the brigi.e., the gaol or prisonroom of the ship-to await a courtmartial. When a man-o'-war lies in harbour, the master-at-arms has plenty to do to guard against smuggling, in the shape of illicit introduction of spirits into the ship. He personally searches the crew of every boat that returns to the ship from the shore, and he carefully inspects the boat itself; and at all hours he and his corporals are vigilant to prevent the surreptitious bringing on board of rum or any other

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intoxicant. In spite of every precaution, and every check that experience suggests to the officials, it is well known that spirits are not unfrequently smuggled on board in novel and ingenious ways; nay, some uncharitable growlers insinuate that the master-atarms himself winks at smuggling, when he safely can - for a consideration. Even if this be the case, we are very sure that he, in his official capacity, will seize, and report, and bring to punishment, whoever he finds intoxicated, unless some strong private motive induces him to overlook the offence, if practicable. He figures prominently on those painful and impressive occasions, when the boatswain's shrill pipe and call of " All ha-a-ands witness punishment, ahoy!" summons the crew to the waist and gangways. Then, when the officers, in full uniform, are grouped on the quarterdeck, and the marines are drawn up on the poop with fixed bayonets, and the quartermasters have rigged the gratings against the bul wark, and the boatswain and his mates are ready with their canvas bags containing the cruel cats-then the master-at-arms, with rattan in hand, aided by a marine, brings forward the poor prisoner, and assists him to strip, at the word of command, for punishment. When the cat descends, wielded by the brawny arm of a boatswain's mate, the master-at-arms, in a loud voice, counts "one," "two," and so on up to a dozen; and he holds a cup of water ready to apply to the lips of the sufferer, if the latter should appear likely to faint. The master-at-arms, too, in conjunction with the provost-marshal, conducts a condemned criminal to execution, on shipboard. Altogether, it will be seen that the office of a masterat-arms is a responsible one; and, indeed, so far as pay is concerned, he rates on the ship's books next to the clerk. The duties of his office are of an absolutely indispensable nature, and the internal discipline of the ship very much depends on their efficient fulfilment. Some masters-at-arms undoubtedly are very respectable, worthy men, who conscientiously endeavour to perform the unpleasant duties of their station in a faithful and unassuming manner; but many others, we fear, are merciless, petty tyrants, of very dubious personal character and our dearly-beloved Jonathan Ferret is a type of the latter class. A certain de

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