Eccentricity is a fruit that does not grow on every tree. To be a genuine eccentric a man must have learned that his own queer way of doing things brings him out right side up more often than not; and he must be quite free from the inhibitions which keep most people from doing exactly as they would like to do. The difference may be expressed by saying that the average man has an uncontrollable impulse to throw at the waiter’s head the bad egg he has been brought for breakfast, but he somehow manages to control it. The eccentric throws the egg.
Now there exists a general opinion that the combination of characters for eccentricity is found at its perfect best in just two classes of men—artists and naval officers. Whenever a novelist, from Tobias Smollett down to Robert Louis Stevenson, has wanted an eccentric character, he has drawn either a painter or a sea captain, and usually the latter. It is the object of this paper to examine a few actual and non-fictional naval eccentrics, in an effort to find out whether Billy Bones and Commodore Trunnion are really typical naval men.
Let us start with the most eccentric of all—Captain Teach (Blackbeard, the pirate), an officer in no navy but his own, yet so perfect a case that he merits special consideration. Why did he go in for the elaborate make-up; the enormous three-pronged beard (so like that of Admiral von Tirpitz in cut!) braided at the ends and tied with red ribbon; the heavy, gold earrings; the slouch hat, ornamented with a row of slow matches stuck under the brim and projecting over his face; the bandoleer with five pistols stuck in it and the belt with the frieze of knives all the way round? I maintain that he went in for them because it was an almost physical necessity of existence. They gave him the ferocious appearance which was so valuable in his business. The pirates of his day were a lot of hard cases; like the racketeers of our own time they imagined a soft-spoken leader must be a weakling. Captain Vane and Stede Bonnet, two of the most successful and intelligent pirate leaders, were deposed and marooned by their crews, simply for lack of the proper “pirate quality.”
Blackbeard was a more satisfactory ideal. He claimed to be the only son of the Devil, and encouraged the idea by ordering his crew below from time to time, shutting down all the hatches and lighting fires of brimstone at various places in the hold of the ship. The first man to break out of the sulphurous reek was degraded to the post of scullion, and Blackbeard himself was always the last to leave the stinking ship. He was also in the habit of inviting members of his gang to dine with him, and, at least once in the course of a meal, of drawing two of the pistols from his bandoleer and firing them off under the table, with resultant damage to the collection of feet found there.
Now Blackbeard was either an extremely intelligent man or one of those intuitive geniuses who do the right thing by inspiration. The total result of all this foolishness was that he became the beau ideal of a pirate leader; up to the time Lieutenant Maynard brought him to book his crew was constantly on the increase and he never once (unlike all other pirate captains) had a mutiny to deal with. In short, his eccentricity was just the right thing.
The next notable eccentrics come in a pair—Captain Jenkins and Admiral Vernon. It was at the time considered highly unusual of Captain Jenkins to pickle his ears in brine after the commander of the Spanish guar da-costa, who caught him smuggling, had cut them off. I fail to see it that way. Captain Jenkins was a simple- hearted man who kept the ears as a souvenir in exactly the same spirit that people talk about their operations and keep removed appendixes in glass jars on the mantelpiece. There are probably dozens like him. His act received undeserved prominence because he fell into the hands of another eccentric of far different character— Admiral Vernon.
Vernon, alone among naval officers, was a boaster, and almost alone among them, a politician. A too indulgent father had yielded to his boyish wishes to be sent to sea, and all his life long Vernon regretted the whim and its results. His ambition (after maturity) was for the life of a country squire and a pack of foxhounds, and all his singularities of conduct may be traced to this cause. At the earliest possible date he abandoned the Navy for Parliament. It was in the reign of Walpole when every talent but Walpole’s own was sedulously stifled by a minister so avid of power that he could not spare the least fragment of it. Vernon, unable to make any headway in the House, became more and more flamboyant in his speeches in opposition, and when a naval friend told him about Captain Jenkins and his ears, he saw a great opportunity. He had Jenkins carefully coached, and brought to the bar of the House.
“And what did you do when they cut off your ears, Captain Jenkins?”
“I commended my soul to God and my cause to my country!” And plunk! went two pickled ears on the speaker’s desk.
It was a battle cry. Vernon followed with a speech full of nonsense, in which he laid the evils of the country to Walpole, Spain, and the curse of drink (he had strong views on temperance also) and offered to take Porto Bello, the great Spanish stronghold in America, with only six ships. Walpole saw a heaven-sent political opportunity in this last statement; appointed Vernon to the command of six ships and sent him to Porto Bello. On the way out Vernon, who was called “Old Grog” because of the grogram overcoat he wore, even in the tropics (it gave him such a country-squirish appearance) exercised his views on temperance by mixing his sailors’ rum ration with water, thereby producing grog, the immemorial tipple of the British Navy. Then he took Porto Bello.
The result was the fall of Walpole’s administration and Vernon’s elevation to a dizzy pinnacle of prominence from which he tumbled with a crash when he failed to take Cartagena with a far stronger expedition. But the remainder of his history is outside our compass.
Thus far we have discussed only the special cases of eccentricity among naval officers-—those who, for one reason or another, have had eccentricity forced upon them. Vernon, Jenkins, and Teach were made eccentric by circumstances. But what about the general case? Is there any clue that will lead us to the springs of conduct which, by shore-going standards, is so peculiar as to make naval men a race apart? I think there is.
The great object of every military officer, in time of war, is to come to grips with the enemy. Only through combat lies the road to promotion, honors, and success. The Army man is always more or less in contact with his opponents. If he is a subaltern there are skirmishes and outpost affairs; if he is in the higher command, the enemy’s army is before him, ready to attack or to be attacked. His opportunity is omnipresent.
The naval commander, with the same will to fight the enemy, has always first to find him—a condition which the introduction of steam and steel has hardly- changed. The whole French battle fleet, under Missiessy, puts to sea, and after a cruise lasting months, returns to port without even having sighted a British ship. Nelson and Villeneuve go whirling halfway round the world, unable to make contact. Admiral Rodman crosses 3,000 miles of ocean and never sights a German ship till they surrender. Under the conditions, the realization that he is at last in the presence of the foe is often received with extravagant delight by the naval commander, and he does things that earn him the name of an eccentric.
Let us apply this key to some notable cases. America at the time, and historians ever since have laughed over Captain Hull leaping into the air with a shout of “Now boys, pour it into them!” and splitting his trousers to ribbons as the Constitution opened fire on the Guerrière. The trousers were undoubtedly too tight; but a good deal must be allowed for the excitement of the moment. Hull himself, and the men of the Constitution, had been training for years with that broadside in view; the captain of that very ship there, across the water firing at them, had announced his intention of taking the Constitution into Halifax; and they had been under fire for several minutes without returning a shot. It speaks volumes for the discipline on the American frigate that the gun laying was so deadly accurate under the circumstances.
Again, the famous Danish seaman, Tordenskjold, in his Lovendals Gallej, meets an English-built frigate bound for Sweden, in 1715. They fight all night in a sea so heavy that gunnery is bad. In the morning Tordenskjold has run out of ammunition and the Swede has lost her main topmast and with it her power of maneuver. The Swede has so much the heavier crew that Tordenskjold dare not board, and his opponent cannot get close enough to try it. In short, all they can do is glare at each other. So the Lovendals Gallej hoists a flag of truce, runs down close to her opponent and Tordenskjold shouts his regrets that so interesting a battle should be broken off. But he is out of powder; if the Swedish commander will lend him some, he will gladly continue the fight. The Swedish captain, not unnaturally, answers that he has no powder to spare, and standing on their quarter-decks, the two drink toasts to each other amid the cheers of the admiring crews.
There is something a little singular in the request for the loan of some powder, but again, consider the circumstances. This was Tordenskjold’s first single-ship action; he was a Norwegian—that is, he belonged to a subject people—and his chances of advancement in Denmark were poor. He saw his one big opportunity slipping away from him and took the only means he could think of to prevent it.
To the same cause may be referred Commander Perkins’ otherwise inexplicable enthusiasm which set him dancing atop the turret of the Chickasaw, a target for every gun in the Confederate forts and fleet, as his ship steamed into Mobile Bay.
The corollary of these exhibitions of enthusiasm is the somewhat startling way naval commanders occasionally take to bring about the great opportunity. Take the case of Thomas Boyle of the privateer Chasseur on his famous cruise in the Bristol Channel in the War of 1812. He had so thoroughly scared the English merchants that they were no longer sending ships to sea except under strong protection. Boyle was not too long on supplies and feared he might have to run for home. So he captured a fishing craft and sent in to be posted in London the following proclamation:
... I do, therefore, by virtue of the power and authority in me vested (being in possession of sufficient force) declare all the ports, harbors, bays, creeks, mouths, inlets, outlets, islands, and seacoast of the Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland in a state of strict and rigorous blockade.
This has been treated as a piece of amusing and delightful whimsy on Boyle’s part. It was nothing of the sort; it was simply an effort to drum up business for the fine privateer he commanded by daring the English to come out of their holes.
Lord Fisher’s extraordinary proposal to (in his own words) “ ‘Copenhagen’ the German fleet at Kiel a la Nelson”, which he confesses to urging on King Edward VII, belongs in the same class, with the added motive that Fisher very clearly saw that England would have to fight Germany some day, and from motives of genuine patriotism wanted to do it in a way that would insure victory from the start. The idea was probably sound enough even if it did make politicians’ hair stand on end.
... So much for the reputed eccentricity of naval officers in the presence of the enemy. It can be laid directly at the door of a complex of emotions compounded of patriotism, ambition, and fighting spirit— perhaps after all, the same thing under various names. But there is another phase of the question. Commodore Trunnion’s eccentricity (in Smollett’s book) consisted not in what he did while he was fighting, but in fitting up his home like a ship, sleeping in a hammock, and tacking back and forth down the road against a head wind while riding his horse. In other words, the popular picture of a retired naval officer was (and still is) that of a gentleman who cannot sleep unless a boy is hired to throw buckets of water against his window.
There was more to this in sailing ship days than there is now, though the popular mind, always slow to change, preserves the picture it has enshrined. In the time of Hawke, and even in the time of Nelson, nobody went to sea but sailors. An ocean voyage was a thing to be dreaded, and when a landsman left on one, he bade his family farewell with almost as much ceremony as though he were leaving on the last journey—which he not infrequently was. As for seamen, when they went to sea, they went to stay; Nelson’s first visit to the Mediterranean lasted four years, the greater part of which was spent constantly at sea; his second, two years, figures which make the longest cruises of today seem insignificant. And officers entered the Navy as the merest children of nine or ten; the natural product being that they had no homes but their ships and no interests but professional ones.
Now take a man who has been thus tied to a profession for some forty or fifty years and set him down among his fellow citizens who have been in contact with one another and with the rich and varied stream of modern life. He will be a duck among the chickens and all the chickens will cluck at him for being one; in short, he will be a Commodore Trunnion.
But that is not all. If this hypothetical naval commander be a man of force and originality, he will seek to solve the problems of shore life in the light of naval experience. Thus Captain John Montagu (of Hawke’s fleet) was anxious to meet a certain lady at court. She proved inaccessible, so Montagu had his captain’s barge placed on wheels, and with the barge crew rowing energetically against the empty air, was conveyed to London in state by eight horses. The result was that he became the most talked-of person in town and won the desired introduction to the lady of his heart.
Parenthetically, we might remark that this same Captain Montagu produced another gem, following a spree and a brawl in Lisbon in which he had his eyes blacked. He had the left eyes of the starboard rowers of the barge crew and the right eyes of the port rowers blacked to match his own, “for it would never do for a captain in His Majesty’s Navy to be worse off then his men,” quoth he.
To return—Lord Cochrane attempted to storm the heights of promotion and honors in the same reckless manner that he carried a Spanish 32-gun frigate with the crew of his little 14-gun cutter. He wrote to Lord St. Vincent suggesting that as he was the ablest officer on the station, he ought to have a bigger ship. St. Vincent told him that the capture had been a comparatively easy one; that his (Cochrane’s) losses had not been so severe as to indicate a desperate resistance from the Spaniards. Cochrane (a junior lieutenant, mind you, to the first sea lord of the admiralty) replied that the Victory's losses at the battle of St. Vincent had been smaller still, but that Lord St. Vincent on that occasion had had no hesitation about accepting very generous rewards.
This was carrying naval methods into administrative life with a vengeance, though the motive already mentioned (desire for opportunity) probably had its weight here too. But the hasty and bad- tempered Cochrane, whose life was a kind of movie serial of hairbreadth escapes and impossible exploits, belongs rather in the company of the adventurers than in that of the eccentrics. An adventurer is one who seeks the unknown; an eccentric, one who seeks the known in an extraordinary way.
Now in this little list of naval men whose unusual actions have amused or horrified their contemporaries there is one thing that strikes the eye. They were all very able men. Eccentrics on land might or might not be able; to name a few of the more prominent there were Samuel Johnson, Beau Brummel, Alfonso X of Castile, and Artemus Ward, only one of them famous aside from his eccentricity. But your naval eccentric (who, I hope I have shown, is simply a naval commander bursting with ideas and enthusiasm) is, nine times out of ten, conscious of extraordinary powers and is either trying to put them to use, or is becoming explosively delighted at the chance of using them.
Run over the list. Blackbeard was the most famous of all the pirates, save only Kidd, and the most successful; Vernon did one great deed if he never did another; Hull was one of the best frigate captains and Boyle one of the best privateer captains of the War of 1812; Tordenskjold was the great sea hero of northern Europe; Montagu was singled out for special mention for his gallantry by Hawke, rose to be an admiral and to conduct an able campaign in the West Indies; ships in the navies of three nations have been named Cochrane in memory of that officer’s services; and as for Perkins dancing on his turret, the pilot of the Tennessee said after the battle, “Damn him! He stuck to us like a leech; we could not get away from him. It was he who shot away our steering gear, jammed the port shutters, and wounded Admiral Buchanan.” Everybody knows what Lord Fisher’s services were.
Which leads to the conclusion that eccentric naval commanders are, after all, not so eccentric in the special sense of the word. Perkins dancing on his turret top, Tordenskjold begging the loan of some powder, are of a piece with Nelson sailing into battle at Trafalgar wearing all his medals or Suffren stamping the deck and shouting, “Bring flags! Bring all the flags! Hang them all round the ship!” Eccentric in the sense that any departure from the usual is eccentric, yes; but it is the eccentricity of the battle captain who is never satisfied with his efforts until he receives the enemy’s surrender on his own quarterdeck.