ardinal principle with a Navy
Captain that his subordinates are disintegrated parts of himself,
detached from the main body on special service, and that the order of
the minutest midshipman must be as deferentially obeyed by the seamen
as if proceeding from the Commodore on the poop. This principle was
once emphasised in a remarkable manner by the valiant and handsome Sir
Peter Parker, upon whose death, on a national arson expedition on the
shores of Chesapeake Bay, in 1812 or 1813, Lord Byron wrote his
well-known stanzas. "By the god of war!" said Sir Peter to his sailors,
"I'll make you touch your hat to a midshipman's coat, if it's only hung
on a broomstick to dry!"

That the king, in the eye of the law, can do no wrong, is the
well-known fiction of despotic states; but it has remained for the
navies of Constitutional Monarchies and Republics to magnify this
fiction, by indirectly extending it to all the quarter-deck
subordinates of an armed ship's chief magistrate. And though judicially
unrecognised, and unacknowledged by the officers themselves, yet this
is the principle that pervades the fleet; this is the principle that is
every hour acted upon, and to sustain which, thousands of seamen have
been flogged at the gangway.

However childish, ignorant, stupid, or idiotic a midshipman, if he but
orders a sailor to perform even the most absurd action, that man is not
only bound to render instant and unanswering obedience, but he would
refuse at his peril. And if, having obeyed, he should then complain to
the Captain, and the Captain, in his own mind, should be thoroughly
convinced of the impropriety, perhaps of the illegality of the order,
yet, in nine cases out of ten, he would not publicly reprimand the
midshipman, nor by the slightest token admit before the complainant
that, in this particular thing, the midshipman had done otherwise than
perfectly right.

Upon a midshipman's complaining of a seaman to Lord Collingwood, when
Captain of a line-of-battle ship, he ordered the man for punishment;
and, in the interval, calling the midshipman aside, said to him, "In
all probability, now, the fault is yours--you know; therefore, when the
man is brought to the mast, you had better ask for his pardon."

Accordingly, upon the lad's public intercession, Collingwood, turning
to the culprit, said, "This young gentleman has pleaded so humanely for
you, that, in hope you feel a due gratitude to him for his benevolence,
I will