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.
