The Reine Blanche was to sail in a few days for Valparaiso,
and the mutineers expected to go with her and be delivered up to a
British man-of-war. Undismayed by this prospect, they continued stanch
in their contumacy, and presently an armed cutter, "painted a 'pirate
black,' its crew a dark, grim-looking set, and the officers uncommonly
fierce-looking little Frenchmen," conveyed them on board the frigate,
where they were duly handcuffed, and secured by the ankle to a great
iron bar bolted down to the berth-deck.
Touching the proceedings on board the French man-of-war, its imperfect
discipline, and the strange, un-nautical way of carrying on the duty,
Typee is jocular and satirical. American though he be--and, but for
occasional slight yankeeisms in his style, we might have doubted even
that fact--he has evidently much more sympathy with his cousin John Bull
than with his country's old allies, the French, whom he freely admits to
be a clever and gallant nation, whilst he broadly hints that their
valour is not likely to be displayed to advantage on the water. He finds
too much of the military style about their marine institutions. Sailors
should be fighting men, but not soldiers or musket-carriers, as they all
are in turn in the French navy. He laughs at or objects to every thing;
the mustaches of the officers, the system of punishment, the sour wine
that replaces rum and water, the soup instead of junk, the pitiful
little rolls baked on board, and distributed in lieu of hard biscuit.
And whilst praising the build of their ships--the only thing about them
he does praise--he ejaculates a hope, which sounds like a doubt, that
they will not some day fall into the hands of the people across the
Channel. "In case of war," he says, "what a fluttering of French ensigns
there would be! for the Frenchman makes but an indifferent seaman, and
though for the most part he fights well enough, somehow or other, he
seldom fights well enough to beat:"--at sea, be it understood. We are
rather at a loss to comprehend the familiarity shown by Typee with the
internal arrangements and architecture of the Reine Blanche. His time on
board was passed in fetters; at nightfall on the fifth day he left the
ship. How, we are curious to know, did he become acquainted with the
minute details of "the crack craft in the French navy," with the
disposition of her guns and decks, the complicated machinery by which
certain exceedingly simple things were done, and even with the rich
hangings, mirrors, and mahogany of the commodore's cabin? Surely the
ragged and disreputable mutineer of the Julia, whose foot had scarcely
touched the gangway, when he was hurried into confinement below, could
have had scanty opportunity for such observations: unless, indeed,
Herman Melville, or Typee, or the Rover, or by whatever other _alias_ he
be known, instead of creeping in at the hawse-holes, was welcomed on the
quarter-deck and admitted to the gun-room, or to the commodore's cabin,
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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