After a three months’ absence, I found myself in San Francisco
again, without a cent. When my credit was about exhausted, (for I
had become too mean and lazy, now, to work on a morning paper,
and there were no vacancies on the evening journals,) I was
created San Francisco correspondent of the Enterprise, and at the
end of five months I was out of debt, but my interest in my work
was gone; for my correspondence being a daily one, without rest
or respite, I got unspeakably tired of it. I wanted another
change. The vagabond instinct was strong upon me. Fortune favored
and I got a new berth and a delightful one. It was to go down to
the Sandwich Islands and write some letters for the Sacramento
Union, an excellent journal and liberal with employees.
We sailed in the propeller Ajax, in the middle of winter. The
almanac called it winter, distinctly enough, but the weather was
a compromise between spring and summer. Six days out of port, it
became summer altogether. We had some thirty passengers; among
them a cheerful soul by the name of Williams, and three sea-worn
old whaleship captains going down to join their vessels. These
latter played euchre in the smoking room day and night, drank
astonishing quantities of raw whisky without being in the least
affected by it, and were the happiest people I think I ever saw.
And then there was “the old Admiral—” a retired whaleman. He was
a roaring, terrific combination of wind and lightning and
thunder, and earnest, whole-souled profanity. But nevertheless he
was tender-hearted as a girl. He was a raving, deafening,
devastating typhoon, laying waste the cowering seas but with an
unvexed refuge in the centre where all comers were safe and at
rest. Nobody could know the “Admiral” without liking him; and in
a sudden and dire emergency I think no friend of his would know
which to choose—to be cursed by him or prayed for by a less
efficient person.
His Title of “Admiral” was more strictly “official” than any
ever worn by a naval officer before or since, perhaps—for it was
the voluntary offering of a whole nation, and came direct from
the people themselves without any intermediate red tape—the
people of the Sandwich Islands. It was a title that came to him
freighted with affection, and honor, and appreciation of his
unpretending merit. And in testimony of the genuineness of the
title it was publicly ordained that an exclusive flag should be
devised for him and used solely to welcome his coming and wave
him God-speed in his going. From that time forth, whenever his
ship was signaled in the offing, or he catted his anchor and
stood out to sea, that ensign streamed from the royal halliards
on the parliament house and the nation lifted their hats to it
with spontaneous accord.
Yet he had never fired a gun or fought a battle in his life.
When I knew him on board the Ajax, he was seventy-two years old
and had plowed the salt water sixty-one of them. For sixteen
years he had gone in and out of the harbor of Honolulu in command
of a whaleship, and for sixteen more had been captain of a San
Francisco and Sandwich Island passenger packet and had never had
an accident or lost a vessel. The simple natives knew him for a
friend who never failed them, and regarded him as children regard
a father. It was a dangerous thing to oppress them when the
roaring Admiral was around.
Two years before I knew the Admiral, he had retired from the
sea on a competence, and had sworn a colossal nine-jointed oath
that he would “never go within smelling distance of the salt
water again as long as he lived.” And he had conscientiously kept
it. That is to say, he considered he had kept it, and it would
have been more than dangerous to suggest to him, even in the
gentlest way, that making eleven long sea voyages, as a
passenger, during the two years that had transpired since he
“retired,” was only keeping the general spirit of it and not the
strict letter.
The Admiral knew only one narrow line of conduct to pursue in
any and all cases where there was a fight, and that was to
shoulder his way straight in without an inquiry as to the rights
or the merits of it, and take the part of the weaker side.—And
this was the reason why he was always sure to be present at the
trial of any universally execrated criminal to oppress and
intimidate the jury with a vindictive pantomime of what he would
do to them if he ever caught them out of the box. And this was
why harried cats and outlawed dogs that knew him confidently took
sanctuary under his chair in time of trouble. In the beginning he
was the most frantic and bloodthirsty Union man that drew breath
in the shadow of the Flag; but the instant the Southerners began
to go down before the sweep of the Northern armies, he ran up the
Confederate colors and from that time till the end was a rampant
and inexorable secessionist.
He hated intemperance with a more uncompromising animosity
than any individual I have ever met, of either sex; and he was
never tired of storming against it and beseeching friends and
strangers alike to be wary and drink with moderation. And yet if
any creature had been guileless enough to intimate that his
absorbing nine gallons of “straight” whiskey during our voyage
was any fraction short of rigid or inflexible abstemiousness, in
that self-same moment the old man would have spun him to the
uttermost parts of the earth in the whirlwind of his wrath. Mind,
I am not saying his whisky ever affected his head or his legs,
for it did not, in even the slightest degree. He was a capacious
container, but he did not hold enough for that. He took a level
tumblerful of whisky every morning before he put his clothes
on—"to sweeten his bilgewater,” he said.—He took another after
he got the most of his clothes on, “to settle his mind and give
him his bearings.” He then shaved, and put on a clean shirt;
after which he recited the Lord’s Prayer in a fervent, thundering
bass that shook the ship to her kelson and suspended all
conversation in the main cabin. Then, at this stage, being
invariably “by the head,” or “by the stern,” or “listed to port
or starboard,” he took one more to “put him on an even keel so
that he would mind his hellum and not miss stays and go about,
every time he came up in the wind.”—And now, his state-room door
swung open and the sun of his benignant face beamed redly out
upon men and women and children, and he roared his “Shipmets
a’hoy!” in a way that was calculated to wake the dead and
precipitate the final resurrection; and forth he strode, a
picture to look at and a presence to enforce attention. Stalwart
and portly; not a gray hair; broadbrimmed slouch hat; semi-sailor
toggery of blue navy flannel—roomy and ample; a stately expanse
of shirt-front and a liberal amount of black silk neck-cloth tied
with a sailor knot; large chain and imposing seals impending from
his fob; awe-inspiring feet, and “a hand like the hand of
Providence,” as his whaling brethren expressed it; wrist-bands
and sleeves pushed back half way to the elbow, out of respect for
the warm weather, and exposing hairy arms, gaudy with red and
blue anchors, ships, and goddesses of liberty tattooed in India
ink. But these details were only secondary matters—his face was
the lodestone that chained the eye. It was a sultry disk, glowing
determinedly out through a weather beaten mask of mahogany, and
studded with warts, seamed with scars, “blazed” all over with
unfailing fresh slips of the razor; and with cheery eyes, under
shaggy brows, contemplating the world from over the back of a
gnarled crag of a nose that loomed vast and lonely out of the
undulating immensity that spread away from its foundations. At
his heels frisked the darling of his bachelor estate, his terrier
“Fan,” a creature no larger than a squirrel. The main part of his
daily life was occupied in looking after “Fan,” in a motherly
way, and doctoring her for a hundred ailments which existed only
in his imagination.
The Admiral seldom read newspapers; and when he did he never
believed anything they said. He read nothing, and believed in
nothing, but “The Old Guard,” a secession periodical published in
New York. He carried a dozen copies of it with him, always, and
referred to them for all required information. If it was not
there, he supplied it himself, out of a bountiful fancy,
inventing history, names, dates, and every thing else necessary
to make his point good in an argument. Consequently he was a
formidable antagonist in a dispute. Whenever he swung clear of
the record and began to create history, the enemy was helpless
and had to surrender. Indeed, the enemy could not keep from
betraying some little spark of indignation at his manufactured
history—and when it came to indignation, that was the Admiral’s
very “best hold.” He was always ready for a political argument,
and if nobody started one he would do it himself. With his third
retort his temper would begin to rise, and within five minutes he
would be blowing a gale, and within fifteen his smoking-room
audience would be utterly stormed away and the old man left
solitary and alone, banging the table with his fist, kicking the
chairs, and roaring a hurricane of profanity. It got so, after a
while, that whenever the Admiral approached, with politics in his
eye, the passengers would drop out with quiet accord, afraid to
meet him; and he would camp on a deserted field.
But he found his match at last, and before a full company. At
one time or another, everybody had entered the lists against him
and been routed, except the quiet passenger Williams. He had
never been able to get an expression of opinion out of him on
politics. But now, just as the Admiral drew near the door and the
company were about to slip out, Williams said:
“Admiral, are you certain about that circumstance concerning
the clergymen you mentioned the other day?”—referring to a piece
of the Admiral’s manufactured history.
Every one was amazed at the man’s rashness. The idea of
deliberately inviting annihilation was a thing incomprehensible.
The retreat came to a halt; then everybody sat down again
wondering, to await the upshot of it. The Admiral himself was as
surprised as any one. He paused in the door, with his red
handkerchief half raised to his sweating face, and contemplated
the daring reptile in the corner.
“Certain of it? Am I certain of it? Do you think I’ve been
lying about it? What do you take me for? Anybody that don’t know
that circumstance, don’t know anything; a child ought to know it.
Read up your history! Read it up——-, and don’t come asking a
man if he’s certain about a bit of ABC stuff that the very
southern niggers know all about.”
Here the Admiral’s fires began to wax hot, the atmosphere
thickened, the coming earthquake rumbled, he began to thunder and
lighten. Within three minutes his volcano was in full irruption
and he was discharging flames and ashes of indignation, belching
black volumes of foul history aloft, and vomiting red-hot
torrents of profanity from his crater. Meantime Williams sat
silent, and apparently deeply and earnestly interested in what
the old man was saying. By and by, when the lull came, he said in
the most deferential way, and with the gratified air of a man who
has had a mystery cleared up which had been puzzling him
uncomfortably:
“Now I understand it. I always thought I knew that piece of
history well enough, but was still afraid to trust it, because
there was not that convincing particularity about it that one
likes to have in history; but when you mentioned every name, the
other day, and every date, and every little circumstance, in
their just order and sequence, I said to myself, this sounds
something like—this is history—this is putting it in a shape
that gives a man confidence; and I said to myself afterward, I
will just ask the Admiral if he is perfectly certain about the
details, and if he is I will come out and thank him for clearing
this matter up for me. And that is what I want to do now—for
until you set that matter right it was nothing but just a
confusion in my mind, without head or tail to it.”
Nobody ever saw the Admiral look so mollified before, and so
pleased. Nobody had ever received his bogus history as gospel
before; its genuineness had always been called in question either
by words or looks; but here was a man that not only swallowed it
all down, but was grateful for the dose. He was taken a back; he
hardly knew what to say; even his profanity failed him. Now,
Williams continued, modestly and earnestly:
“But Admiral, in saying that this was the first stone thrown,
and that this precipitated the war, you have overlooked a
circumstance which you are perfectly familiar with, but which has
escaped your memory. Now I grant you that what you have stated is
correct in every detail—to wit: that on the 16th of October,
1860, two Massachusetts clergymen, named Waite and Granger, went
in disguise to the house of John Moody, in Rockport, at dead of
night, and dragged forth two southern women and their two little
children, and after tarring and feathering them conveyed them to
Boston and burned them alive in the State House square; and I
also grant your proposition that this deed is what led to the
secession of South Carolina on the 20th of December following.
Very well.” [Here the company were pleasantly surprised to hear
Williams proceed to come back at the Admiral with his own
invincible weapon—clean, pure, manufactured history, without a
word of truth in it.] “Very well, I say. But Admiral, why
overlook the Willis and Morgan case in South Carolina? You are
too well informed a man not to know all about that circumstance.
Your arguments and your conversations have shown you to be
intimately conversant with every detail of this national quarrel.
You develop matters of history every day that show plainly that
you are no smatterer in it, content to nibble about the surface,
but a man who has searched the depths and possessed yourself of
everything that has a bearing upon the great question. Therefore,
let me just recall to your mind that Willis and Morgan
case—though I see by your face that the whole thing is already
passing through your memory at this moment. On the 12th of
August, 1860, two months before the Waite and Granger affair, two
South Carolina clergymen, named John H. Morgan and Winthrop L.
Willis, one a Methodist and the other an Old School Baptist,
disguised themselves, and went at midnight to the house of a
planter named Thompson—Archibald F. Thompson, Vice President
under Thomas Jefferson,—and took thence, at midnight, his
widowed aunt, (a Northern woman,) and her adopted child, an
orphan—named Mortimer Highie, afflicted with epilepsy and
suffering at the time from white swelling on one of his legs, and
compelled to walk on crutches in consequence; and the two
ministers, in spite of the pleadings of the victims, dragged them
to the bush, tarred and feathered them, and afterward burned them
at the stake in the city of Charleston. You remember perfectly
well what a stir it made; you remember perfectly well that even
the Charleston Courier stigmatized the act as being unpleasant,
of questionable propriety, and scarcely justifiable, and likewise
that it would not be matter of surprise if retaliation ensued.
And you remember also, that this thing was the cause of the
Massachusetts outrage. Who, indeed, were the two Massachusetts
ministers? and who were the two Southern women they burned? I do
not need to remind you, Admiral, with your intimate knowledge of
history, that Waite was the nephew of the woman burned in
Charleston; that Granger was her cousin in the second degree, and
that the woman they burned in Boston was the wife of John H.
Morgan, and the still loved but divorced wife of Winthrop L.
Willis. Now, Admiral, it is only fair that you should acknowledge
that the first provocation came from the Southern preachers and
that the Northern ones were justified in retaliating. In your
arguments you never yet have shown the least disposition to
withhold a just verdict or be in anywise unfair, when
authoritative history condemned your position, and therefore I
have no hesitation in asking you to take the original blame from
the Massachusetts ministers, in this matter, and transfer it to
the South Carolina clergymen where it justly belongs.”
The Admiral was conquered. This sweet spoken creature who
swallowed his fraudulent history as if it were the bread of life;
basked in his furious blasphemy as if it were generous sunshine;
found only calm, even-handed justice in his rampart partisanship;
and flooded him with invented history so sugarcoated with
flattery and deference that there was no rejecting it, was “too
many” for him. He stammered some awkward, profane sentences about
the——-Willis and Morgan business having escaped his memory, but
that he “remembered it now,” and then, under pretence of giving
Fan some medicine for an imaginary cough, drew out of the battle
and went away, a vanquished man. Then cheers and laughter went
up, and Williams, the ship’s benefactor was a hero. The news went
about the vessel, champagne was ordered, and enthusiastic
reception instituted in the smoking room, and everybody flocked
thither to shake hands with the conqueror. The wheelman said
afterward, that the Admiral stood up behind the pilot house and
“ripped and cursed all to himself” till he loosened the
smokestack guys and becalmed the mainsail.
The Admiral’s power was broken. After that, if he began
argument, somebody would bring Williams, and the old man would
grow weak and begin to quiet down at once. And as soon as he was
done, Williams in his dulcet, insinuating way, would invent some
history (referring for proof, to the old man’s own excellent
memory and to copies of “The Old Guard” known not to be in his
possession) that would turn the tables completely and leave the
Admiral all abroad and helpless. By and by he came to so dread
Williams and his gilded tongue that he would stop talking when he
saw him approach, and finally ceased to mention politics
altogether, and from that time forward there was entire peace and
serenity in the ship.
