Both officers and men assembled in the lee waist, and through that bareheaded crowd the mess-mates of Shenly brought his body to the same gangway where it had thrice winced under the scourge. But there is something in death that ennobles even a pauper's corpse; and the Captain himself stood bareheaded before the remains of a man whom, with his hat on, he had sentenced to the ignominious gratings when alive.
"_I am the resurrection and the life!_" solemnly began the Chaplain, in full canonicals, the prayer-book in his hand.
"Damn you! off those booms!" roared a boatswain's mate to a crowd of top-men, who had elevated themselves to gain a better view of the scene.
"_We commit this body to the deep!_" At the word, Shenly's mess- mates tilted the board, and the dead sailor sank in the sea.
"Look aloft," whispered Jack Chase. "See that bird! it is the spirit of Shenly."
Gazing upward, all beheld a snow-white, solitary fowl, which- whence coming no one could tell-had been hovering over the main-mast during the service, and was now sailing far up into the depths of the sky.
CHAPTER LXXXII
WHAT REMAINS OF A MAN-OF-WAR'S-MAN AFTER HIS BURIAL AT SEA
Upon examining Shenly's bag, a will was found, scratched in pencil, upon a blank leaf in the middle of his Bible; or, to use the phrase of one of the seamen, in the midships, atween the Bible and Testament, where the Pothecary (Apocrypha) uses to be.
The will was comprised in one solitary sentence, exclusive of the dates and signatures: "_In case I die on the voyage, the Purser will please pay over my wages to my wife, who lives in Portsmouth, New Hampshire_."
Besides the testator's, there were two signatures of witnesses.
This last will and testament being shown to the Purser, who, it seems, had been a notary, or surrogate, or some sort of cosy chamber practitioner in his time, he declared that it must be "proved." So the witnesses were called, and after recognising their hands to the paper; for the purpose of additionally testing their honesty, they were interrogated concerning the day on which they had signed-whether it was _Banyan Day_, or _Duff Day_, or _Swampseed Day_; for among the sailors on board a man-of-war, the land terms, _Monday_, _Tuesday_, _Wednesday_, are almost unknown. In place of these they substitute nautical names, some of which are significant of the daily bill of fare at dinner for the week.
The two witnesses were somewhat puzzled by the attorney-like questions of the Purser, till a third party came along, one of the ship's barbers, and declared, of his own knowledge, that Shenly executed the instrument on a _Shaving Day_; for the deceased seaman had informed him of the circumstance, when he came to have his beard reaped on the morning of the event.
In the Purser's opinion, this settled the question; and it is to be hoped that the widow duly received her husband's death-earned wages.
Shenly was dead and gone; and what was Shenly's epitaph?
— "D. D."-
opposite his name in the Purser's books, in "_Black's best Writing Fluid_"-funereal name and funereal hue-meaning "Discharged, Dead."
CHAPTER LXXXIII
A MAN-OF-WAR COLLEGE
In our man-of-war world, Life comes in at one gangway and Death goes overboard at the other. Under the man-of-war scourge, curses mix with tears; and the sigh and the sob furnish the bass to the shrill octave of those who laugh to drown buried griefs of their own. Checkers were played in the waist at the time of Shenly's burial; and as the body plunged, a player swept the board. The bubbles had hardly burst, when all hands were _piped down_ by the Boatswain, and the old jests were heard again, as if Shenly himself were there to hear.
This man-of-war life has not left me unhardened. I cannot stop to weep over Shenly now; that would be false to the life I depict; wearing no mourning weeds, I resume the task of portraying our man-of-war world.
Among the various other vocations, all driven abreast on board of the Neversink, was that of the schoolmaster. There were two academies in the frigate. One comprised the apprentice boys, who, upon certain days of the week, were indoctrinated in the mysteries of the primer by an invalid corporal of marines, a slender, wizzen-cheeked man, who had received a liberal infant- school education.
The other school was a far more pretentious affair-a sort of army and navy seminary combined, where mystical mathematical problems were solved by the midshipmen, and great ships-of-the-line were navigated over imaginary shoals by unimaginable observations of the moon and the stars, and learned lectures were delivered upon great guns, small arms, and the curvilinear lines described by bombs in the air.
"_The Professor_" was the title bestowed upon the erudite gentleman who conducted this seminary, and by that title alone was he known throughout the ship. He was domiciled in the Ward- room, and circulated there on a social par with the Purser, Surgeon, and other _non-combatants_ and Quakers. By being advanced to the dignity of a peerage in the Ward-room, Science and Learning were ennobled in the person of this Professor, even as divinity was honoured in the Chaplain enjoying the rank of a spiritual peer.
Every other afternoon, while at sea, the Professor assembled his pupils on the half-deck, near the long twenty-four pounders. A bass drum-head was his desk, his pupils forming a semicircle around him, seated on shot-boxes and match-tubs.
They were in the jelly of youth, and this learned Professor poured into their susceptible hearts all the gentle gunpowder maxims of war. Presidents of Peace Societies and Superintendents of Sabbath-schools, must it not have been a most interesting sight?
But the Professor himself was a noteworthy person. A tall, thin, spectacled man, about forty years old, with a student's stoop in his shoulders, and wearing uncommonly scanty pantaloons, exhibiting an undue proportion of his boots. In early life he had been a cadet in the military academy of West Point; but, becoming very weak-sighted, and thereby in a good manner disqualified for active service in the field, he had declined entering the army, and accepted the office of Professor in the Navy.
His studies at West Point had thoroughly grounded him in a knowledge of gunnery; and, as he was not a little of a pedant, it was sometimes amusing, when the sailors were at quarters, to hear him criticise their evolutions at the batteries. He would quote Dr. Hutton's Tracts on the subject, also, in the original, "_The French Bombardier_," and wind up by Italian passages from the "_Prattica Manuale dell' Artiglieria_."
Though not required by the Navy regulations to instruct his scholars in aught but the application of mathematics to navigation, yet besides this, and besides instructing them in the theory of gunnery, he also sought to root them in the theory of frigate and fleet tactics. To be sure, he himself did not know how to splice a rope or furl a sail; and, owing to his partiality for strong coffee, he was apt to be nervous when we fired salutes; yet all this did not prevent him from delivering lectures on cannonading and "breaking the enemy's line."
He had arrived at his knowledge of tactics by silent, solitary study, and earnest meditation in the sequestered retreat of his state-room. His case was somewhat parallel to the Scotchman's- John. Clerk, Esq., of Eldin-who, though he had never been to sea, composed a quarto treatise on fleet-fighting, which to this day remains a text-book; and he also originated a nautical manoeuvre, which has given to England many a victory over her foes.
Now there was a large black-board, something like a great-gun target-only it was square-which during the professor's lectures was placed upright on the gun-deck, supported behind by three boarding-pikes. And here he would chalk out diagrams of great fleet engagements; making marks, like the soles of shoes, for the ships, and drawing a dog-vane in one corner to denote the assumed direction of the wind. This done, with a cutlass he would point out every spot of interest.