Tar and Feathers
The sailor must have his joke in defiance of danger and death. When Commodore Anson took Panama in 1742, his men clothed themselves over their jackets and trousers in all the gay apparel they could collect. They did the same at Capua under Nelson; and the hero, elevated on a cask in the grand square, and surrounded by motley groups of masquerading tars, drank rich wine out of a golden goblet to the toast of “Better times to us.” In 1805, the brave Yeo, then a lieutenant of the Loire frigate, with a mere handful of men, stormed the heavy fort of El Muros, near Finisterre, and carried it at noon-day. Having destroyed the fortification and sent off the stores, the seamen arrayed themselves in the immense Spanish grenadiers’ bear skin caps and accoutrements, and all black and dirty with their labour, rowed off in this state to the ship, to the great amusement of Captain Maitland and the hearty approval of their shipmates. Many other anecdotes of a similar kind might be related; and now it appears, by recent accounts from China, that Jack is still pursuing his old game; for it is related that at the destruction of several war-junks in the neighbourhood of Canton, the English seamen arrayed themselves in the spoils of the enemy, and figured away in mandarin caps and tunics, and the curly-toed shoes of the Chinamen; nor was the essential tail wanted; for many of the bodies were divested of this ornament, which Jack being in a “cue” for humour, suspended at his own back, occasionally raising it in a coil, and offering to take a messmate in tow by it.
We did not break up our little Naval Board without mentioning impressment, and a thing called the CAT; the word was no sooner out, than it operated like the morning-gun in “The Critic,” and off went the following:—