“Then, ‘One dozen, sir, please,’ he reported, saluting the commander.
“ ‘Continue the punishment,’ was the calm reply.
“A new man, and a new cat. Another dozen reported; again the same reply. Three dozen. The flesh, like burning steel, had changed from red to purple, and blue, and white; and between the third and fourth dozen, the suffering wretch, pale enough now, and in all probability sick, begged a comrade to give him a mouthful of water.
“There was a tear in the eye of the hardy sailor who obeyed him, whispering as he did so, ‘Keep up, Bill; it’ll soon be over now.’
“ ‘Five, six,’ the corporal slowly counted; ‘seven, eight.’ It is the last dozen, and how acute must be the torture! ‘Nine, ten.’ The blood comes now fast enough, and—yes, gentle reader, I will spare your feelings. The man was cast loose at last, and put on the sick-list; he had borne his punishment without a groan, and without moving a muscle. A large pet monkey sat crunching nuts in the rigging, and grinning all the time; I have no doubt he enjoyed the spectacle immensely, for he was only an ape.”
Dr. Stables gives his opinion on the use of the cat in honest and outspoken terms. He considers “corporal punishment, as applied to men, cowardly, cruel, and debasing to human nature; and as applied to boys, brutal, and sometimes even fiendish.”
The writer has statistics before him which prove that 456 cases of flogging boys took place in 1875, and that only seven men were punished during that year. There is every probability that the use of the naval cat will ere long be abolished, and important as is good discipline on board ship, there are many leading authorities who believe that it can be maintained without it. The captain of a vessel is its king, reigning in a little world of his own, and separated for weeks or months from the possibility of reprimand. If he is a tyrannical man, he can make his ship a floating hell for all on board. A system of fines for small offences has been proposed, and the idea has this advantage, that in case they prove on investigation to have been unjustly imposed, the money can be returned. The disgrace of a flogging sticks to a boy or man, and, besides, as a punishment is infinitely too severe for most of the offences for which it is inflicted. It would be a cruel punishment were the judge infallible, but with an erring human being for an irresponsible judge, the matter is far worse. And that good seamen are deterred from entering the Royal Navy, knowing that the commission of a peccadillo or two may bring down the cat on their unlucky shoulders, is a matter of fact.
We shall meet the sailor on the sea many a time and again during the progress of this work, and see how hardly he earns his scanty reward in the midst of the awful dangers peculiar to the elements he dares. Shakespeare says that he is—
“A man whom both the waters and the wind,
In that vast tennis-court, hath made the ball
For them to play on”—
that the men of all others who have made England what she is, have not altogether a bed of roses even on a well-conducted vessel, whilst they may lose their lives at any moment by shipwreck and sudden death. George Herbert says—
“Praise the sea, but keep on land.”
And while the present writer would be sorry to prevent any healthy, capable, adventurous boy from entering a noble profession, he recommends him to first study the literature of the sea to the best and fullest of his ability. Our succeeding chapter will exhibit some of the special perils which surround the sailor’s life, whilst it will exemplify to some extent the qualities specially required and expected from him.
CHAPTER IV.
Perils of the Sailor’s Life.
The Loss of the Captain—Six Hundred Souls swept into Eternity without a Warning—The Mansion and the Cottage alike Sufferers—Causes of the Disaster—Horrors of the Scene—Noble Captain Burgoyne—Narratives of Survivors—An almost Incredible Feat—Loss of the Royal George—A great Disaster caused by a Trifle—Nine Hundred Lost—A Child saved by a Sheep—The Portholes Upright—An involuntary Bath of Tar—Rafts of Corpses—The Vessel Blown up in 1839–40—The Loss of the Vanguard—Half a Million sunk in Fifty Minutes—Admirable Discipline on Board—All Saved—The Court Martial.
England, and indeed all Europe, long prior to 1870 had been busily constructing ironclads, and the daily journals teemed with descriptions of new forms and varieties of ships, armour, and armament, as well as of new and enormous guns, which, rightly directed, might sink them to the bottom. Among the more curious of the ironclads of that period, and the construction of which had led to any quantity of discussion, sometimes of a very angry kind, was the turret-ship—practically the sea-going “monitor”—Captain, which Captain Cowper Phipps Coles had at length been permitted to construct. Coles, who was an enthusiast of great scientific attainments, as well as a practical seaman, which too many of our experimentalists in this direction have not been, had distinguished himself in the Crimea, and had later made many improvements in rendering vessels shot-proof. His revolving turrets are, however, the inventions with which his name are more intimately connected, although he had much to do with the general construction of the Captain, and other ironclads of the period.
The Captain was a large double-screw armour-plated vessel, of 4,272 tons. Her armour in the most exposed parts was eight inches in thickness, ranging elsewhere downwards from seven to as low as three inches. She had two revolving turrets, the strongest and heaviest yet built, and carried six powerful guns. Among the peculiarities of her construction were, that she had only nine feet of “free-board”—i.e., that was the height of her sides out of water. The forecastle and after-part of the vessel were raised above this, and they were connected with a light hurricane-deck. This, as we shall see, played an important part in the sad disaster we have to relate.
On the morning of the 8th of September, 1870, English readers, at their breakfast-tables, in railway carriages, and everywhere, were startled with the news that the Captain had foundered, with all hands, in the Bay of Biscay. Six hundred men had been swept into eternity without a moment’s warning. She had been in company with the squadron the night before, and, indeed, had been visited by the admiral, for purposes of inspection, the previous afternoon. The early part of the evening had been fine; later it had become what sailors call “dirty weather;” at midnight the wind rose fast, and soon culminated in a furious gale. At 2.15 in the morning of the 7th a heavy bank of clouds passed off, and the stars came out clear and bright, the moon then setting; but no vessel could be discerned where the Captain had been last observed. At daybreak the squadron was all in sight, but scattered. “Only ten ships instead of eleven could be discerned, the ‘Captain’ being the missing one.” Later, it appeared that seventeen of the men and the gunner had escaped, and landed at Corbucion, north of Cape Finisterre, on the afternoon of the 7th. All the men who were saved belonged to the starboard watch; or, in other words, none escaped except those on deck duty. Every man below, whether soundly sleeping after his day’s work, or tossing sleeplessly in his berth, thinking of home and friends and present peril, or watching the engines, or feeding the furnaces, went down, without the faintest possibility of escaping his doom.
Think of this catastrophe, and what it involved! The families and friends of 600 men plunged into mourning, and the scores on scores of wives and children into poverty! In one street of Portsea, thirty wives were made widows by the occurrence.44 The shock of the news killed one poor woman, then in weak health. Nor were the sad effects confined to the cottages of the poor. The noble-hearted captain of the vessel was a son of Field-Marshal Burgoyne; Captain Coles, her inventor; a son of Mr. Childers, the then First Lord of the Admiralty; the younger son of Lord Northbrook; the third son of Lord Herbert of Lea; and Lord Lewis Gordon, brother of the Marquis of Huntley, were among the victims of that terrible morning. The intelligence arrived during the excitement caused by the defeat and capitulation of Sedan, which, involving, as it did, the deposition of the Emperor and the fate of France,