Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 3, July, 1851. Various
we had not been six hours at sea when all was a picture of order and propriety. The decks were cleared of every one not actually engaged in the ship's working, or specially permitted to remain; ropes were coiled; boats hauled up; sails trimmed; hatches down; sentinels paced the deck in appointed places, and all was discipline and regularity. From the decorous silence that prevailed, none could have supposed so many hundred living beings were aboard, still less, that they were the same disorderly mob who sailed from the Mersey a few short hours before. From the surprise which all this caused me, I was speedily aroused by an order more immediately interesting, being summoned on the poop-deck to attend the general muster. Up they came from holes and hatchways, a vast host, no longer brawling and insubordinate, but quiet, submissive, and civil. Such as were wounded had been placed under the doctor's care, and all those now present were orderly and service-like. With a very few exceptions, they were all sailors, a few having already served in a king's ship. The first lieutenant, who inspected us, was a grim, gray-headed man past the prime of life, with features hardened by disappointment and long service, but who still retained an expression of kindliness and good-nature. His duty he dispatched with all the speed of long habit; read the name; looked at the bearer of it; asked a few routine questions; and then cried, "stand by," even ere the answers were finished. When he came to me he said:
"Abraham Hackett. Is that your name, lad?"
"No, sir. I'm called Maurice Tiernay."
"Tiernay, Tiernay," said he a couple of times over. "No such name here."
"Where's Tiernay's name, Cottle?" asked he of a subordinate behind him.
The fellow looked down the list—then at me—then at the list again—and then back to me, puzzled excessively by the difficulty, but not seeing how to explain it.
"Perhaps I can set the matter right, sir," said I. "I came aboard along with a wounded countryman of mine—the young Frenchman who is now in the sick bay."
"Ay, to be sure; I remember all about it now," said the lieutenant. "You call yourselves French officers?"
"And such are we, sir."
"Then how the devil came ye here? Mother Martin's cellar is, to say the least of it, an unlikely spot to select as a restaurant."
"The story is a somewhat long one, sir."
"Then I haven't time for it, lad," he broke in. "We've rather too much on hands just now for that. If you've got your papers, or any thing to prove what you assert, I'll land you when I come into the Downs, and you'll, of course, be treated as your rank in the service requires. If you have not, I must only take the responsibility on myself to regard you as an impressed man. Very hard, I know, but can't help it. Stand by."
These few words were uttered with a most impetuous speed; and as all reply to them was impossible, I saw my case decided and my fate decreed, even before I knew they were under litigation.
As we marched forward to go below, I overheard an officer say to another:
"Hay will get into a scrape about those French fellows; they may turn out to be officers, after all."
"What matter?" cried the other. "One is dying; and the other Hay means to draft on board the 'Téméraire.' Depend upon it, we'll never hear more of either of them."
This was far from pleasant tidings; and yet I knew not any remedy for the mishap. I had never seen the officer who spoke to me ashore, since we came on board. I knew of none to intercede for me; and as I sat down on the bench beside poor Santron's cot, I felt my heart lower than it had ever been before. I was never enamored of the sea service; and certainly the way to overcome my dislike was not by engaging against my own country; and yet this, in all likelihood, was now to be my fate. These were my last waking thoughts the first night I passed on board the Athol.
CHAPTER XXXIII
To be awakened suddenly from a sound sleep; hurried, half-dressed, up a gangway; and, ere your faculties have acquired free play, be passed over a ship's side, on a dark and stormy night, into a boat wildly tossed here and there, with spray showering over you, and a chorus of loud voices about you! is an event not easily forgotten. Such a scene still dwells in my memory, every incident of it as clear and distinct as though it had occurred only yesterday. In this way was I "passed," with twelve others, on board his majesty's frigate, Téméraire, a vessel which, in the sea service, represented what a well-known regiment did on shore, and bore the reputation of being a "condemned ship;" this depreciating epithet having no relation to the qualities of the vessel herself, which was a singularly beautiful French model, but only to that of the crew and officers; it being the policy of the day to isolate the blackguards of both services, confining them to particular crafts and corps, making, as it were, a kind of index expurgatorius, where all the rascality was available at a moment's notice.
It would be neither agreeable to my reader nor myself, if I should dwell on this theme, nor linger on a description where cruelty, crime, heartless tyranny, and reckless insubordination made up all the elements. A vessel that floated the seas only as a vast penitentiary—the "cats," the "yard-arm," and the "gangway," comprising its scheme of discipline—would scarcely be an agreeable subject: and, in reality, my memory retains of the life aboard little else than scenes of suffering and sorrow. Captain Gesbrook had the name of being able to reduce any, the most insubordinate, to discipline. The veriest rascals of the fleet, the consummate scoundrels, one of whom was deemed pollution to an ordinary crew, were said to come from his hands models of seamanship and good conduct; and it must be owned, that if the character was deserved, it was not obtained without some sacrifice. Many died under punishment; many carried away with them diseases under which they lingered on to death; and not a few preferred suicide to the terrible existence on board. And although a Téméraire—as a man who had served in her was always afterward called—was now and then shown as an example of sailorlike smartness and activity, very few knew how dearly that one success had been purchased, nor by what terrible examples of agony and woe that solitary conversion was obtained.
To me the short time I spent on board of her is a dreadful dream. We were bound for the Mediterranean, to touch at Malta and Gibraltar, and then join the blockading squadron before Genoa. What might have been my fate, to what excess passionate indignation might have carried me, revolted as I was by tyranny and injustice, I know not, when an accident, happily for me, rescued me from all temptation. We lost our mizen-mast, in a storm, in the Bay of Biscay, and a dreadful blow on the head, from the spanker-boom, felled me to the deck, with a fracture of the skull.
From that moment I knew of nothing till the time when I lay in my cot, beside a port-hole of the main deck, gazing at the bright blue waters that flashed and rippled beside me, or straining my strength to rest on my elbow, when I caught sight of the glorious city of Genoa, with its grand mountain background, about three miles from where I lay. Whether from a due deference to the imposing strength of the vast fortress, or that the line of duty described our action, I can not say, but the British squadron almost exclusively confined its operations to the act of blockade. Extending far across the bay, the English ensign was seen floating from many a taper mast, while boats, of every shape and size, plied incessantly from ship to ship, their course marked out at night by the meteor-like light that glittered in them; not, indeed, that the eye often turned in that direction, all the absorbing interest of the scene lying in-shore. Genoa was, at that time, surrounded by an immense Austrian force, under the command of General Melas, who, occupying all the valleys and deep passes of the Apennines, were imperceptible during the day; but no sooner had night closed in, than a tremendous cannonade began, the balls describing great semicircles in the air, ere they fell, to scatter death and ruin on the devoted city. The spectacle was grand beyond description, for while the distance at which we lay dulled and subdued the sound of the artillery to a hollow booming like far-off thunder, the whole sky was streaked by the course of the shot, and, at intervals, lighted up by the splendor of a great fire, as the red shot fell into and ignited some large building or other.
As, night after night, the cannonade increased in power and intensity, and the terrible effects showed themselves in the flames which burst out from different quarters of the city, I used to long for morning, to see if the tri-color still floated on the walls, and when my eye caught the well-known ensign, I could