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Updated: June 5, 2025
"I have taken my last dose of salts," said the Captain of the Waist, "and after this mean to stick to fresh water. Ay, maties, ten of us Waisters mean to club together and buy a serving-mallet boat, d'ye see; and if ever we drown, it will be in the 'raging canal! Blast the sea, shipmates! say I." "Profane not the holy element!" said Lemsford, the poet of the gun-deck, leaning over a cannon.
But never mind, my boy: no printer could do the business for you better. That's the way to publish, White-Jacket," turning to me "fire it right into 'em; every canto a twenty-four-pound shot; hull the blockheads, whether they will or no. And mind you, Lemsford, when your shot does the most execution, your hear the least from the foe. A killed man cannot even lisp."
The feeling of insecurity concerning one's possessions in the Neversink, which the things just narrated begat in the minds of honest men, was curiously exemplified in the case of my poor friend Lemsford, a gentlemanly young member of the After-Guard. I had very early made the acquaintance of Lemsford.
But observing that the only man he ever consorted with was Lemsford, I had too much magnanimity, by going off in a pique at his coldness, to let him lose forever the chance of making so capital an acquaintance as myself. Besides, I saw it in his eye, that the man had been a reader of good books; I would have staked my life on it, that he seized the right meaning of Montaigne.
It is curious, how unerringly a man pitches upon a spirit, any way akin to his own, even in the most miscellaneous mob. Lemsford was a poet; so thoroughly inspired with the divine afflatus, that not even all the tar and tumult of a man-of-war could drive it out of him.
Some deemed him a conjurer; others a lunatic; and the knowing ones said, that he must be a crazy Methodist. But well knowing by experience the truth of the saying, that poetry is its own exceeding great reward, Lemsford wrote on; dashing off whole epics, sonnets, ballads, and acrostics, with a facility which, under the circumstances, amazed me.
Faring sumptuously in the ward-room; sleek and round, his ebon face fairly polished with content: ever gay and hilarious; ever ready to laugh and joke, that African slave was actually envied by many of the seamen. There were times when I almost envied him myself. Lemsford once envied him outright, "Ah, Guinea!" he sighed, "you have peaceful times; you never opened the book I read in."
The allusion to the poet Lemsford in a previous chapter, leads me to speak of our mutual friends, Nord and Williams, who, with Lemsford himself, Jack Chase, and my comrades of the main-top, comprised almost the only persons with whom I unreservedly consorted while on board the frigate. For I had not been long on board ere I found that it would not do to be intimate with everybody.
My noble captain, Jack Chase, rather patronised Lemsford, and he would stoutly take his part against scores of adversaries. Frequently, inviting him up aloft into his top, he would beg him to recite some of his verses; to which he would pay the most heedful attention, like Maecenas listening to Virgil, with a book of Aeneid in his hand.
"O Lord!" cried Lemsford, "my Songs of the Sirens!" and he ran down the rigging to the batteries; but just as he touched the gun-deck, gun No. 20 his literary strong-box went off with a terrific report. "Well, my after-guard Virgil," said Jack Chase to him, as he slowly returned up the rigging, "did you get it? You need not answer; I see you were too late.
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