hrough the
Straits of Magellan. The difficult navigation and balky winds made the
passage protracted for a sailing-vessel; all were put on short
rations, and the day before she entered a Chilian port the bread-room
was swept to the last crumbs. "I often could not sleep for hunger when
I turned in." In the same ship, the watch-officers falling short,
through illness or suspension, the captain set a second lieutenant of
marines to take a day watch. Being, as he supposed, put to do
something, he naturally wanted to do it, if he only knew what it was,
and how it was to be done. The master of the ship was named Peter
Wager, and to him, when taking sights, the marine appealed. "Peter,
what's the use of being officer of the deck if you don't do anything?
Tell me something to do." "Well," Peter replied, "you might send all
the watch aft and take in the mizzen-royal"--the mizzen-royal being
the smallest of all sails, requiring about two ordinary men, and in
no wise missed when in. This was practical "tales for the marines."

This boatswain afterwards saw the last of the _Congress_, when the
_Merrimac_--or rather the _Virginia_, to give her her Confederate
name--wasted time murdering a ship already dead, aground and on fire.
He often afterwards spun me the yarn; for I liked the old man, and not
infrequently went to see him in later days. He had borne
good-humoredly the testiness with which a youngster is at times prone
to assert himself against what he fancies interference, and I had
appreciated the rebuke. The _Congress_ disaster was a very big and
striking incident in the career of any person, and it both ministered
to his self-esteem and provided the evening of his life with material
for talk. Unhappily, I have to confess, as even Boswell at times did,
I took no notes, and cannot reproduce that which to me is of absorbing
interest, the individual impressions of a vivid catastrophe.

The boatswain was one of the four who in naval phrase were termed
"warrant" officers, in distinction from the lieutenants and those
above, who held their offices by "commission." The three others were
the gunner, carpenter, and sailmaker, names which sufficiently
indicate their several functions. In the hierarchical classification
of the navy, as then established by long tradition, the midshipmen,
although on their way to a commission, were warrant officers also; and
in consequence, though they had a separate mess, they had the same
smoking-place