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A comic piece of insubordination on my part recurs to me in connection with flogging. About the year 1840 or 1841, a midshipman on the Pacific station was flogged. I think the ship was the 'Peak. The event created some sensation, and was brought before Parliament. Two frigates were sent out to furnish a quorum of post-captains to try the responsible commander.
These questions, on more than one occasion, took quite the form of a severe cross-examination, the post-captains in particular seeming determined to arrive at a clear and distinct understanding as to the motives which prompted us in many of our actions and decisions.
Nor is there any government, however despotic, that ventures to deny to the least of its subjects the privilege of a sociable chat. Not the Thirty Tyrants even the clubbed post-captains of old Athens could stop the wagging tongues at the street-corners.
I was very glad to hear that he got his post rank at the same time as my brother Jack did; and now the three old messmates, as they delight to call themselves, are post-captains, and will some day, I hope, be admirals. I wish, however, that they had not to wait so long.
The Admirals and their staffs in front, and the Post-captains of the ships that had entered competitors, just behind. On the forward side, extending the whole breadth of the ship, was the dense array of the ship's company.
For his part, he liked things 'made out of whole cloth. Then he had sent the ship round to a distant roadstead, in order that there might be no more post-captains and rear-admirals among the people; and here had he been as much as four days on nothing but nuts. Nuts might do for the philosophy of a monkey, but he found, on trial, that it played the devil with the philosophy of a man.
There was one, however, waiting for him outside the palace, as fine and officer-like looking man as any of those present in admirals' or post-captains' uniforms his father, and the knowledge of the intense delight his promotion gave him, greatly added to the satisfaction Pearce felt on the occasion.
"Do you know anything of my cousin's captain?" said Edmund; "Captain Marshall? You have a large acquaintance in the navy, I conclude?" "Among admirals, large enough; but," with an air of grandeur, "we know very little of the inferior ranks. Post-captains may be very good sort of men, but they do not belong to us.
Three post-captains in gallant array, with swords by their sides, our own captain being one, and three surgeons with lancets in their pockets, congregated with grave politeness, and taking their chairs according to precedency of rank, formed the Hygeian court.
By this prompt substitution of employments, I found I had effectually changed places with the cabin-boy; who, instead of waiting on me, was, in future, to receive that trifling attention at my hands. The mates were presented as two rear-admirals at nurse, and the crew was said to be composed of so many post-captains in the navy of Great Britain.
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