to abler hands the grateful though difficult task of proposing a plan for manning the fleet in war, which shall be of general application, and shall require the least possible degree of compulsion consistent with the prompt and effective attainment of that end. Besides this, attention has been solicited to a few suggestions, which, however trivial may appear their separate value, if carried out may collectively aid in its accomplishment. We would not be viewed as alarmists, but safely it may be asserted that at some time this important subject must absorb the deepest and most exclusive attention, yet it seems to sleep even where the duty of providing against the need is imperative. At such an anxious period the nation will be undergoing a transition from an almost unprecedentedly long enjoyment of peace to "war's alarms," with its destinies guided by men animated by the spirit and glorious recollections of the deeds of their forefathers, but unused to war. Such ought not to be a season of preparation in this vital matter, but rather one in which to repose on the utility of those which should have been planned under the then unattainable advantages of leisure, deliberation, and such trial as time and circumstances may have afforded. This brings us briefly to recapitulate the grounds of the opinion we espouse. The Register and Enlistment Acts became laws under these advantages and trial; yet it is notorious that they barely suffice, and occasionally with much inconvenient delay, to man a small fleet in peace, an impotence that suggests the obvious question, whether they ought to be relied upon to man a large one in war, when the working of them will be impeded, and they will have to struggle against powerful influences now dormant ? If, as between the Navy and the merchant-service, there be in the former mild discipline, less work and privation, more liberty on shore when belonging to a ship, sufficient and better food, as large recompenses in money or in money's worth, and for the majority more surely to be reaped prospective rewards, and still this superiority does not attract the best seamen, or all times a sufficient number of inferior ones, will it be contended that, when in all probability a reversal of most of this shall have occurred, when assuredly there will be more rigorous discipline, perhaps inferior food, certainly smaller wages and less liberty on shore than in merchantmen,-will it be contended that more or better seamen will flock to the Navy? The additional public inducements will be bounties, which, as formerly observed, never have proved very productive-the Will-o'-the-wisp of prize-money, which, as already noticed, will be realised chiefly by the light-armed, and not by the masses of shield-and-buckler men-and perhaps an increase in wages, which, as previously showed, will never win this race against mercantile competition. What harm would ensue from prospective or conditional legislation, if a provision should be organised during peace, based on regulated compulsion, to supply the possible (we have used this word against our better judgment) deficiencies which may exist after a trial shall have been made of enlistment, aided by such additional encouragement as may then appear most useful? If such a provision should prove superfluous, repeal or let the law repose among others that are useless or obsolete. But if the substitute do fail, on which dependence seems to be placed in opposition to the evidence almost daily afforded of its nullity, recourse must then be had to the ancient mode, which, with all its hideous deformity and danger to domestic tranquillity, will again

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have survived and will reign over adverse opinion-this must then be resorted to, under the self-condemnatory conviction, that all was not attempted which might, if not have rendered coercion unnecessary, at least have mitigated the peril and severity of its operation.

As England's salvation against foreign aggression ever depends on the aquatic bias of the people, the ocean, unstable in everything besides, will be a stronghold for her, if she do not neglect to use the obvious means which the services of seamen, however obtained, offer for her preservation. Whether the realisation of them by impressment be legal, or only customary, is alike indifferent to us, who view it solely in a plain matter-of-fact light as a power inherent in all governments, and as one, moreover, which, with all its faults, has contributed to England's greatness, and often has assured her safety when no other human means would have availed; and we cannot but regard all attempts to inculcate a belief that compulsory naval service will be unnecessary in future wars as thoughtless and cruel deceptions, and as an encouragement to hopes for which a candid examination of the real state of the case affords no reasonable foundation. We therefore are utterly averse to any project contemplating a formal and statutory relinquishment of that power, until it be demonstrated that in modern naval warfare it has been, or henceforward can be, replaced by voluntary service; conceiving that nothing less conclusive than a successful experiment in once manning the fleet in war, and speedily, too, by enlistment-the substitute to be available at all times and under any circumstances-will afford such confidence or justify such renunciation. If it be objected that the terms are unreasonable, it is replied, that a nation's existence may be risked by any that are less exigent. Besides, all experience proves that it is sound wisdom to retain an authority for a vital purpose, however popularly obnoxious, or plausibly or virulently it may be assailed, rather than to yield while a reasonable probability remains that a resumption of it may have to be attempted. Considering our actual position as respects this question, would it not be wise forthwith to prepare to call this power into action as much modified as a due examination of the attendant difficulties will admit, and the altered spirit of the times seems to demand? It is on this account that we have deemed the lull to be a more favourable season in which to submit the remarks which some practical acquaintance with the details of the subject have suggested, than a time when the public mind, agitated on various grounds, will be inflamed most unseasonably on one that very excusably will enlist its strongest passions and sympathies.

In terminating a series of papers prompted by a deep conviction of the truth of the leading position maintained in them, it may be observed that, however imperfectly the subject may have been treated, it is one with regard to which it is impossible to ascribe interested motives to the writer. Perhaps even it might better square with personal interest to have remained silent, but, as in fable a mouse is said by persevering applicacations of trivial strength to have freed a lion from his toils, an humble individual may at least endeavour to warn our British lion against the meshes that a false security daily is weaving around his noblest limbmeshes, which, if they be not soon shaken off, will ultimately lead to the outpouring of his own heart's blood, instead of that of his enemies.

W. H. B.

ON NAUTICAL SUPERSTITION.*
*

66

THE temper of man affords problems which it is very difficult to solve. We have remarked, that a belief in ghosts has been prevalent in all ages; and even now, though weakened and scorned, it is not eradicated -for, as Sir John Smyth observes, there is no beating reason into the sinciputs and occiputs of some fellowes." Indeed, many have considered the idea to be quite consonant with the physical condition of man, and one which has rather tended to assist the cause of virtue than that of vice. Not a few thinkers have held, that an utter contempt of the doctrine may induce scepticism in graver matters, and that the fear of midnight visitations is at once sane and salutary. "The rustic," says Coleridge, "would have little reason to thank the philosopher who should give him true conceptions of the folly of believing in ghosts, omens, and dreams, at the price of abandoning his faith in Divine Providence, and in the continued existence of his fellow-creatures after their death."

That seamen are found in this state of adult infancy is certainly true, though not to the extent ascribed to them. They must have been more abject slaves to superstition formerly than at present, or they would hardly have been marked down by so many authors; and if all the love and dread of the marvellous which is told about them were true, they ought to have figured in with the owl, the hare, and the old woman, of Ripa's well-known emblem. Reginald Scott remarks-" Innumerable are the tales of wonder among such as frequent the seas, about the noises, flashes, shadowes, echoes, and other visible appearances and noises. nightly seen and heard upon the waters." Smollett, aware of these credulous feelings, makes Commodore Trunnion one of the boldest men alive by daylight; yet, at midnight, drives him into the dreaded noose of matrimony by the glimmer of a bunch of dead whitings. And Anec dote Andrews, alluding to this irregularity of character, says-" Superstition and profaneness, those extremes of human conduct, are too often found in the sailor, and the man who dreads the stormy effects of drowning a cat, or of whistling a country dance while he leans over the gunwale, will too often wantonly defy his Creator by the most daring imprecations, and the most licentious behaviour."

Nor was it only to the least intelligent class of those afloat that these feelings were habitual, there being lots of on dits of equivocal conduct on the part of many brave and educated officers. The renowned and successful Sir Charles Wager was an out-and-out ghost-seer: and a distinguished Flag-Officer of the present day has related to us, most circumstantially, how a bona fide wraith appeared to a Lieutenant, who was drowned on the following evening. The courageous Lord St. Vincent, after sitting up all night with a friend for the purpose, heard such supernatural noises in his sister's house that he advised her to quit it. And that apparently vigorous-minded man, Henry Teonge, when chaplain of the Assistance, in 1676, records, in his quaint and amusing diary "At 9 a clock a crickett sang very merrily in the foot of our mizon, and was also heard a little the night before; there was also a death

*Concluded from page 446, No. 113.

watch heard in the gunn-roome. Deus vortat bene!" The same reverend gentleman, proceeding in a hoy to join the Bristol, the vessel which conveyed him ran aground, an accident that made him "much admire that all meanes, though never so well intended, should prove so very crosse; thence I prognosticated a crosse voyage, and could I have got but a reasonable price for my goods, I would have returned home again."

While mentioning Parson Teonge, it should be observed that the clergy not only had individuals of their own order infected with this credulity, but as a body they largely encouraged a general belief in ghosts, especially those of holy men, under the plausible pretext of its being one of the methods by which men's minds were tamed, when mental discipline was at a low ebb. In this pious fraud—to use a queer compound-they were aided and assisted by many public instructors, and the whole body of predicant friars, who deemed the delivery of the "delectation of fables with fardells of falsehood" a mighty excellent means of inculcating in the minds of the people the more homely virtues of their condition; and it was sagely considered, that such a process was more peculiarly useful in subjecting soldiers and sailors, whose bodily strength and ferocious valour rendered them otherwise unassailable. Numerous, therefore, were the instances where a weak tincture of truth was strongly "dashed and brewed with lies;" and still more numerous were those to which truth was an utter stranger. Yet the intention was often so good as to partly sanctify the means. Thus Matthew Paris tells us of a great ship of the Londoners being saved during a tempest, in 1190, by the apparition of that blessed martyr Thomas Archbishop of Canterbury repairing on board, and promising safety, not only to her crew, but to the whole royal fleet, on condition that all hands should mend their manners. On another occasion, when the arch-enemy of mankind had got into a ship with the intent of deluding a few souls, St. Lawrence, after whom the vessel was named, being pleased with the good conduct of some of the crew, descended from the skies to protect them. The conflict was long and terrible; but in the end the gridiron prevailed over the tormentors, and Satan was driven overboard with a shout as loud and dreadful as the roaring of the lion of Rabbi Jehosuah Ben Hananiah, at the sound of whose voice all the women aborted, and the people's teeth dropped out of their heads.

But, under every allowance, this mode of treatment deserved corruptio optimi pessima for its motto. As if the making of falsehood subservient to gain the ends of truth were to be righteously punished, by generating a chaotic confusion of ideas, it usually happened that the perceptions of right and wrong were undermined by this fluctuating pro and con,-in the same way that the two algebraic terms of plus and minus mutually destroy each other, and leave the result as nothing. Hence the innumerable acts of violence committed under the garb of sanctity. Hollingshed, after describing a horrible tempest in the year 1380-in which a fleet was placed in such stress that more than a thousand men lost their lives, and the residue nearly perished by hunger, cold, and fatigue-proceeds to give a strange notion of appeasing the wrath of the Omnipotent. "Some writers," ejaculates the rare old chronicler-" some writers impute this calamitie to light on the said Sir John Arundell (the Admiral) and his companie, for the lascivious U. S. JOURN, No. 115, JUNE, 1838.

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and filthie rule which they kept before their setting forth, in places where they laie, till their provision was readie; who, not content with that which they did before they took ship, in ravishing men's wives, maids, and daughters, they carried them aboard with them

"Sæva libido furens, quid non mortalia cogis

Pectora? Quid ve tuo non est violabile telo.

"And yet when the tempest rose, like cruel and unmerciful persons, they threw them into the sea, either that they would not be troubled with their lamentable noise or crying, or for that they thought so long as they had such women on board, whom they had abused so long, God would not cease the rage of the tempest."

The most general effect, however, of the warranted ghost-stories among our more modern and more civilised seamen, is to point a moral, without caring to account for appearances by circumstances connected with the physical laws of matter. He who has been much among them must be struck with the fact, that the spectral visits they describe almost invariably arrive at conclusions favourable to right principle, and impress the force and intensity of the Deity's revenge against murder, with little taint of that taste for supernatural revealments of treasure, in which their shore brethren delight. While they reward the virtuous and good, they show the sinner-to use the inspired words of Isaiah-that "God's right hand is stretched over him still." It is true that some of their yarns are

"half horror and half whim,

Like fiends in glee, ridiculously grim❞—

but they all bear the stamp of good feeling; not so much the mere effusions of spectre-mongers, gloating on horror, as cases of retributive justice. Unlike the village ghost-which mostly scares clodhoppers in a churchyard, to get its bones removed to consecrated ground, or "bursts its cerements" to announce to some old woman where a few shillings and half-crowns are concealed in a stocking or a teapot-the marine one is usually the messenger of right. It was thus that the shade of the seaman buried clandestinely in the sands of Rupert Valley, at St. Helena, sat upon his unseemly grave, and became the means of bringing the caitiff who had murdered him to condign punishment. Serjeant Matcham, of the Marines, until he surrendered himself to justice, was followed by the ghost of a drummer-boy whom he had made away with to prevent his appearing as a witness against him, and by which he was haunted as regularly as the old woman in a box did him who was in quest of the talisman of Oromanes. In like manner, the mate of the Mona was induced to confess that he had treacherously plunged a messmate overboard in the dark, from being visited nightly by a grinning and hideous white face with goggle eyes, which perched on the foot-clues of his hammock and fascinated his sleepless gaze, while terror gagged his voice, and a monstrous hand, furnished with iron claws, grasping his thighs, prevented his leaping out of bed. So also the Hermione frigate was haunted, after the foul assassination of Captain Pigott and his officers, until even more than the actual number of mutineers had been executed for the atrocity.

We have said that the belief of supernatural vengeance is apparent in most sea-tales, but in none is it more so than in the notion yet strongly prevalent respecting the loss of the Association, with the gallant Sir