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Updated: June 21, 2025
'Would the general of an army say to his officers, "Pray, gentlemen, don't dirty your boots or fatigue your horses to succour the inhabitants of a distant village"? Or a captain to his mates and middies: "Don't turn out, don't go aloft. It is a thing hard, and you might get wet"?
"Don't be too reckless. Just fight to keep the Navy from scoring." "Hepson! Hepson!" came, appealingly, from the seats, as the two elevens lined up at the twenty-five-yard line. "Darry! O Darry!" Grim determination written on their faces, eleven middies awaited the signal, then hurled themselves forward like tigers. The ball came to Dave, who started with it.
I don't think the Chinese authorities were very grateful to us of the Teaser, there, you see, I say us, for I did do something to help in routing out and destroying two nests of pirates; but the merchants, both Chinese and English, feted us most gloriously, and if it had not been for Mr Reardon we three middies might have always been ashore at dinners and dances.
Watty Scott was a scion of a good Scottish Border family, a youth careless and harum-scarum as the most typical of middies, but a gentleman, and popular alike with officers and men. He was about eighteen, had already distinguished himself in more than one brush with the enemy, and was looked on as a most promising officer. But now...! "Oh, little did my mother ken, The day she cradled me,"
Within five minutes the Hanniston players had established the fact that they were not only bulky, but quick and brainy. In fact, though the Navy promptly blocked the ball and got it, the middies were unable to make headway against the college men. Then Hanniston took the ball, fighting slowly but steadily toward the Navy goal line.
When in his cups, he told of the scores that he had slain, counting them off by threes and fives upon his fingers, his thumbs indicating captains, his forefingers first-lieutenants, and so on with the various grades in our service, until the aspirants, or middies, were merely honoured by his little finger as their representative, we only laughed; and asked him, if he had been so destructive to the officers, how many men had fallen by the puissance of his arm.
And middies! know this, that as infants, being too early put on their feet, grow up bandy-legged, and curtailed of their fair proportions, even so, my dear middies, does it morally prove with some of you, who prematurely are sent off to sea. These admonitions are solely addressed to the more diminutive class of midshipmen those under five feet high, and under seven stone in weight.
To-day at noon the flying squadron came in from the northward. Their arrival was awaited by eager and expectant crowds thronging the shore, in anticipation of witnessing the landing of the young royal middies. In this they were disappointed.
Life on board Her Majesty's ships in those days was a very different affair from what it is now, and ours was exceptionally rough, as we were often many months without receiving letters or seeing any civilised people but ourselves. In exchange, we had the interest of being about the last voyagers, I suppose, to whom it could be possible to meet with people who knew nothing of fire-arms as we did on the south Coast of New Guinea and of making acquaintance with a variety of interesting savage and semi-civilised people. But, apart from experience of this kind and the opportunities offered for scientific work, to me, personally, the cruise was extremely valuable. It was good for me to live under sharp discipline; to be down on the realities of existence by living on bare necessaries; to find out how extremely well worth living life seemed to be when one woke up from a night's rest on a soft plank, with the sky for canopy and cocoa and weevilly biscuit the sole prospect for breakfast; and, more especially, to learn to work for the sake of what I got for myself out of it, even if it all went to the bottom and I along with it. My brother officers were as good fellows as sailors ought to be and generally are, but, naturally, they neither knew nor cared anything about my pursuits, nor understood why I should be so zealous in pursuit of the objects which my friends, the middies, christened "Buffons," after the title conspicuous on a volume of the "Suites
The discharge was followed by a stentorian "Three cheers for the great and glorious battle won this day! hip! hip! hurrah! hurrah! hurrah!" in which we fellows joined with a yell. "Ah! you young rascals have got before me this morning, but this afternoon it will be my turn mine and Mr Clare's, you roystering middies!" and the Captain popped down again to finish his toilet.
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