Two Years Before the Mast Part 20

''When for a moment, like a drop of rain, He sinks into thy depths with bubbling groan, Without a grave, unknelled, uncoffined, and unknown.''

The light-hearted boys are now hardened middle-aged men, if the seas, rocks, fevers, and the deadlier enemies that beset a sailor's life on sh.o.r.e have spared them; and the then strong men have bowed themselves, and the earth or sea has covered them.

Even the animals are gone,-- the colony of dogs, the broods of poultry, the useful horses; but the coyotes bark still in the woods, for they belong not to man, and are not touched by his changes.

I walked slowly up the hill, finding my way among the few bushes, for the path was long grown over, and sat down where we used to rest in carrying our burdens of wood, and to look out for vessels that might, though so seldom, be coming down from the windward.

To rally myself by calling to mind my own better fortune and n.o.bler lot, and cherished surroundings at home, was impossible.

Borne down by depression, the day being yet at its noon, and the sun over the old point,-- it is four miles to the town, the Presidio,-- I have walked it often, and can do it once more,-- I pa.s.sed the familiar objects, and it seemed to me that I remembered them better than those of any other place I had ever been in;-- the opening to the little cave; the low hills where we cut wood and killed rattlesnakes, and where our dogs chased the coyotes; and the black ground where so many of the s.h.i.+p's crew and beach-combers used to bring up on their return at the end of a liberty day, and spend the night sub Jove.

The little town of San Diego has undergone no change whatever that I can see. It certainly has not grown. It is still, like Santa Barbara, a Mexican town. The four princ.i.p.al houses of the gente de razon-- of the Bandinis, Estudillos, Arguellos, and Picos-- are the chief houses now; but all the gentlemen-- and their families, too, I believe-- are gone. The big vulgar shop-keeper and trader, Fitch, is long since dead; Tom Wrightington, who kept the rival pulperia, fell from his horse when drunk, and was found nearly eaten up by coyotes; and I can scarce find a person whom I remember. I went into a familiar one-story adobe house, with its piazza and earthen floor, inhabited by a respectable lower-cla.s.s family by the name of Machado, and inquired if any of the family remained, when a bright-eyed middle-aged woman recognized me, for she had heard I was on board the steamer, and told me she had married a s.h.i.+pmate of mine, Jack Stewart, who went out as second mate the next voyage, but left the s.h.i.+p and married and settled here. She said he wished very much to see me. In a few minutes he came in, and his sincere pleasure in meeting me was extremely grateful. We talked over old times as long as I could afford to. I was glad to hear that he was sober and doing well. Dona Tomasa Pico I found and talked with. She was the only person of the old upper cla.s.s that remained on the spot, if I rightly recollect. I found an American family here, with whom I dined,-- Doyle and his wife, nice young people, Doyle agent for the great line of coaches to run to the frontier of the old States.

I must complete my acts of pious remembrance, so I take a horse and make a run out to the old Mission, where Ben Stimson and I went the first liberty day we had after we left Boston (ante, p. 140). All has gone to decay. The buildings are unused and ruinous, and the large gardens show now only wild cactuses, willows, and a few olive-trees.

A fast run brings me back in time to take leave of the few I knew and who knew me, and to reach the steamer before she sails. A last look-- yes, last for life-- to the beach, the hills, the low point, the distant town, as we round Point Loma and the first beams of the light-house strike out towards the setting sun.

Wednesday, August 24th. At anchor at San Pedro by daylight. But instead of being roused out of the forecastle to row the long-boat ash.o.r.e and bring off a load of hides before breakfast, we were served with breakfast in the cabin, and again took our drive with the wild horses to the Pueblo and spent the day; seeing nearly the same persons as before, and again getting back by dark. We steamed again for Santa Barbara, where we only lay an hour, and pa.s.sed through its ca.n.a.l and round Point Conception, stopping at San Luis Obispo to land my friend, as I may truly call him after this long pa.s.sage together, Captain Wilson, whose most earnest invitation to stop here and visit him at his rancho I was obliged to decline.

Friday evening, 26th August, we entered the Golden Gate, pa.s.sed the light-houses and forts, and clipper s.h.i.+ps at anchor, and came to our dock, with this great city, on its high hills and rising surfaces, brilliant before us, and full of eager life.

Making San Francisco my head-quarters, I paid visits to various parts of the State,-- down the Bay to Santa Clara, with its live oaks and sycamores, and its Jesuit College for boys; and San Jose, where is the best girls' school in the State, kept by the Sisters of Notre Dame,-- a town now famous for a year's session of ''The legislature of a thousand drinks,''-- and thence to the rich Almaden quicksilver mines, returning on the Contra Costa side through the rich agricultural country, with its ranchos and the vast grants of the Castro and Soto families, where farming and fruit-raising are done on so large a scale. Another excursion was up the San Joaquin to Stockton, a town of some ten thousand inhabitants, a hundred miles from San Francisco, and crossing the Tuolumne and Stanislaus and Merced, by the little Spanish town of Hornitos, and Snelling's Tavern, at the ford of the Merced, where so many fatal fights are had. Thence I went to Mariposa County, and Colonel Fremont's mines, and made an interesting visit to ''the Colonel,'' as he is called all over the country, and Mrs.

Fremont, a heroine equal to either fortune, the salons of Paris and the drawing-rooms of New York and Was.h.i.+ngton, or the roughest life of the remote and wild mining regions of Mariposa,-- with their fine family of spirited, clever children. After a rest there, we went on to Clark's Camp and the Big Trees, where I measured one tree ninety-seven feet in circ.u.mference without its bark, and the bark is usually eighteen inches thick; and rode through another which lay on the ground, a sh.e.l.l, with all the insides out,-- rode through it mounted, and sitting at full height in the saddle; then to the wonderful Yo Semite Valley,-- itself a stupendous miracle of nature, with its Dome, its Capitan, its walls of three thousand feet of perpendicular height,-- but a valley of streams, of waterfalls, from the torrent to the mere s.h.i.+mmer of a bridal veil, only enough to reflect a rainbow, with their plunges of twenty-five hundred feet, or their smaller falls of eight hundred, with nothing at the base but thick mists, which form and trickle, and then run and at last plunge into the blue Merced that flows through the centre of the valley. Back by the Coulterville trail, the peaks of Sierra Nevada in sight, across the North Fork of the Merced, by Gentry's Gulch, over hills and through canons, to Fremont's again, and thence to Stockton and San Francisco,-- all this at the end of August, when there has been no rain for four months, and the air is clear and very hot, and the ground perfectly dry; windmills, to raise water for artificial irrigation of small patches, seen all over the landscape, while we travel through square miles of hot dust, where they tell us, and truly, that in winter and early spring we should be up to our knees in flowers; a country, too, where surface gold-digging is so common and unnoticed that the large, six-horse stage-coach, in which I travelled from Stockton to Hornitos, turned off in the high road for a Chinaman, who, with his pan and washer, was working up a hole which an American had abandoned, but where the minute and patient industry of the Chinaman averaged a few dollars a day.

These visits were so full of interest, with grandeurs and humors of all sorts, that I am strongly tempted to describe them. But I remember that I am not to write a journal of a visit over the new California, but to sketch briefly the contrasts with the old spots of 1835-6, and I forbear.

How strange and eventful has been the brief history of this marvellous city, San Francisco! In 1835 there was one board shanty. In 1836, one adobe house on the same spot. In 1847, a population of four hundred and fifty persons, who organized a town government. Then came the auri sacra fames, the flocking together of many of the worst spirits of Christendom; a sudden birth of a city of canvas and boards, entirely destroyed by fire five times in eighteen months, with a loss of sixteen millions of dollars, and as often rebuilt, until it became a solid city of brick and stone, of nearly one hundred thousand inhabitants, with all the accompaniments of wealth and culture, and now (in 1859) the most quiet and well-governed city of its size in the United States. But it has been through its season of Heaven-defying crime, violence, and blood, from which it was rescued and handed back to soberness, morality, and good government, by that peculiar invention of Anglo-Saxon Republican America, the solemn, awe-inspiring Vigilance Committee of the most grave and responsible citizens, the last resort of the thinking and the good, taken to only when vice, fraud, and ruffianism have intrenched themselves behind the forms of law, suffrage, and ballot, and there is no hope but in organized force, whose action must be instant and thorough, or its state will be worse than before. A history of the pa.s.sage of this city through those ordeals, and through its almost incredible financial extremes, should be written by a pen which not only accuracy shall govern, but imagination shall inspire.

I cannot pause for the civility of referring to the many kind attentions I received, and the society of educated men and women from all parts of the Union I met with; where New England, the Carolinas, Virginia, and the new West sat side by side with English, French, and German civilization.

My stay in California was interrupted by an absence of nearly four months, when I sailed for the Sandwich Islands in the n.o.ble Boston clipper s.h.i.+p Mastiff, which was burned at sea to the water's edge; we escaping in boats, and carried by a friendly British bark into Honolulu, whence, after a deeply interesting visit of three months in that most fascinating group of islands, with its natural and its moral wonders, I returned to San Francisco in an American whaler, and found myself again in my quarters on the morning of Sunday, December 11th, 1859.

My first visit after my return was to Sacramento, a city of about forty thousand inhabitants, more than a hundred miles inland from San Francisco, on the Sacramento, where was the capital of the State, and where were fleets of river steamers, and a large inland commerce. Here I saw the inauguration of a Governor, Mr. Latham, a young man from Ma.s.sachusetts, much my junior; and met a member of the State Senate, a man who, as a carpenter, repaired my father's house at home some ten years before; and two more Senators from southern California, relics of another age,-- Don Andres Pico, from San Diego; and Don Pablo de la Guerra, whom I have mentioned as meeting at Santa Barbara. I had a good deal of conversation with these gentlemen, who stood alone in an a.s.sembly of Americans, who had conquered their country, spared pillars of the past. Don Andres had fought us at San Pazqual and Sepulveda's rancho, in 1846, and as he fought bravely, not a common thing among the Mexicans, and, indeed, repulsed Kearney, is always treated with respect. He had the satisfaction, dear to the proud Spanish heart, of making a speech before a Senate of Americans, in favor of the retention in office of an officer of our army who was wounded at San Pazqual, and whom some wretched caucus was going to displace to carry out a political job. Don Andres's magnanimity and indignation carried the day.

My last visit in this part of the country was to a new and rich farming region, the Napa Valley, the United States Navy Yard at Mare Island, the river gold workings, and the Geysers, and old Mr.

John Yount's rancho. On board the steamer, found Mr. Edward Stanley, formerly member of Congress from North Carolina, who became my companion for the greater part of my trip. I also met-- a revival on the spot of an acquaintance of twenty years ago-- Don Guadalupe Vallejo; I may say acquaintance, for although I was then before the mast, he knew my story, and, as he spoke English well, used to hold many conversations with me, when in the boat or on sh.o.r.e. He received me with true earnestness, and would not hear of my pa.s.sing his estate without visiting him. He reminded me of a remark I made to him once, when pulling him ash.o.r.e in the boat, when he was commandante at the Presidio. I learned that the two Vallejos, Guadalupe and Salvador, owned, at an early time, nearly all Napa and Sonoma, having princely estates. But they have not much left. They were nearly ruined by their bargain with the State, that they would put up the public buildings if the Capital should be placed at Vallejo, then a town of some promise. They spent $100,000, the Capital was moved there, and in two years removed to San Jose on another contract. The town fell to pieces, and the houses, chiefly wooden, were taken down and removed. I accepted the old gentleman's invitation so far as to stop at Vallejo to breakfast.

The United States Navy Yard, at Mare Island, near Vallejo, is large and well placed, with deep fresh water. The old Independence, and the sloop Decatur, and two steamers were there, and they were experimenting on building a despatch boat, the Saginaw, of California timber.

I have no excuse for attempting to describe my visit through the fertile and beautiful Napa Valley, nor even, what exceeded that in interest, my visit to old John Yount at his rancho, where I heard from his own lips some of his most interesting stories of hunting and trapping and Indian fighting, during an adventurous life of forty years of such work, between our back settlements in Missouri and Arkansas, and the mountains of California, trapping the Colorado and Gila,-- and his celebrated dream, thrice repeated, which led him to organize a party to go out over the mountains, that did actually rescue from death by starvation the wretched remnants of the Donner Party.

I must not pause for the dreary country of the Geysers, the screaming escapes of steam, the sulphur, the boiling caldrons of black and yellow and green, and the region of Gehenna, through which runs a quiet stream of pure water; nor for the park scenery, and captivating ranchos of the Napa Valley, where farming is done on so grand a scale,-- where I have seen a man plough a furrow by little red flags on sticks, to keep his range by, until nearly out of sight, and where, the wits tell us, he returns the next day on the back furrow; a region where, at Christmas time, I have seen old strawberries still on the vines, by the side of vines in full blossom for the next crop, and grapes in the same stages, and open windows, and yet a grateful wood fire on the hearth in early morning; nor for the t.i.tanic operations of hydraulic surface mining, where large mountain streams are diverted from their ancient beds, and made to do the work, beyond the reach of all other agents, of was.h.i.+ng out valleys and carrying away hills, and changing the whole surface of the country, to expose the stores of gold hidden for centuries in the darkness of their earthy depths.

January 10th, 1860. I am again in San Francisco, and my revisit to California is closed. I have touched too lightly and rapidly for much impression upon the reader on my last visit into the interior; but, as I have said, in a mere continuation to a narrative of a sea-faring life on the coast, I am only to carry the reader with me on a revisit to those scenes in which the public has long manifested so gratifying an interest. But it seemed to me that slight notices of these entirely new parts of the country would not be out of place, for they serve to put in strong contrast with the solitudes of 1835-6 the developed interior, with its mines, and agricultural wealth, and rapidly filling population, and its large cities, so far from the coast, with their education, religion, arts, and trade.

On the morning of the 11th January, 1860, I pa.s.sed, for the eighth time, through the Golden Gate, on my way across the delightful Pacific to the Oriental world, with its civilization three thousand years older than that I was leaving behind. As the sh.o.r.es of California faded in the distance, and the summits of the Coast Range sank under the blue horizon, I bade farewell-- yes, I do not doubt, forever-- to those scenes which, however changed or unchanged, must always possess an ineffable interest for me.

It is time my fellow-travellers and I should part company. But I have been requested by a great many persons to give some account of the subsequent history of the vessels and their crews, with which I had made them acquainted. I attempt the following sketches in deference to these suggestions, and not, I trust, with any undue estimate of the general interest my narrative may have created.

Something less than a year after my return in the Alert, and when, my eyes having recovered, I was again in college life, I found one morning in the newspapers, among the arrivals of the day before, ''The brig Pilgrim, Faucon, from San Diego, California.'' In a few hours I was down in Ann Street, and on my way to Hackstadt's boarding-house, where I knew Tom Harris and others would lodge.

Entering the front room, I heard my name called from amid a group of blue-jackets, and several sunburned, tar-colored men came forward to speak to me. They were, at first, a little embarra.s.sed by the dress and style in which they had never seen me, and one of them was calling me Mr. Dana; but I soon stopped that, and we were s.h.i.+pmates once more. First, there was Tom Harris, in a characteristic occupation. I had made him promise to come and see me when we parted in San Diego; he had got a directory of Boston, found the street and number of my father's house, and, by a study of the plan of the city, had laid out his course, and was committing it to memory. He said he could go straight to the house without asking a question. And so he could, for I took the book from him, and he gave his course, naming each street and turn to right or left, directly to the door.

Tom had been second mate of the Pilgrim, and had laid up no mean sum of money. True to his resolution, he was going to England to find his mother, and he entered into the comparative advantages of taking his money home in gold or in bills,-- a matter of some moment, as this was in the disastrous financial year of 1837. He seemed to have his ideas well arranged, but I took him to a leading banker, whose advice he followed; and, declining my invitation to go up and show himself to my friends, he was off for New York that afternoon, to sail the next day for Liverpool. The last I ever saw of Tom Harris was as he pa.s.sed down Tremont Street on the sidewalk, a man dragging a hand-cart in the street by his side, on which were his voyage-worn chest, his mattress, and a box of nautical instruments.

Sam seemed to have got funny again, and he and John the Swede learned that Captain Thompson had several months before sailed in command of a s.h.i.+p for the coast of Sumatra, and that their chance of proceedings against him at law was hopeless. Sam was afterwards lost in a brig off the coast of Brazil, when all hands went down. Of John and the rest of the men I have never heard. The Marblehead boy, Sam, turned out badly; and, although he had influential friends, never allowed them to improve his condition. The old carpenter, the Fin, of whom the cook stood in such awe (ante, p. 47), had fallen sick and died in Santa Barbara, and was buried ash.o.r.e. Jim Hall, from the Kennebec, who sailed with us before the mast, and was made second mate in Foster's place, came home chief mate of the Pilgrim. I have often seen him since. His lot has been prosperous, as he well deserved it should be. He has commanded the largest s.h.i.+ps, and, when I last saw him, was going to the Pacific coast of South America, to take charge of a line of mail steamers. Poor, luckless Foster I have twice seen.

He came into my rooms in Boston, after I had become a barrister and my narrative had been published, and told me he was chief mate of a big s.h.i.+p; that he had heard I had said some things unfavorable of him in my book; that he had just bought it, and was going to read it that night, and if I had said anything unfair of him, he would punish me if he found me in State Street. I surveyed him from head to foot, and said to him, ''Foster, you were not a formidable man when I last knew you, and I don't believe you are now.'' Either he was of my opinion, or thought I had spoken of him well enough, for the next (and last) time I met him he was civil and pleasant.

I believe I omitted to state that Mr. Andrew B. Amerzene, the chief mate of the Pilgrim, an estimable, kind, and trustworthy man, had a difficulty with Captain Faucon, who thought him slack, was turned off duty, and sent home with us in the Alert. Captain Thompson, instead of giving him the place of a mate off duty, put him into the narrow between-decks, where a s.p.a.ce, not over four feet high, had been left out among the hides, and there compelled him to live the whole wearisome voyage, through trades and tropics, and round Cape Horn, with nothing to do,-- not allowed to converse or walk with the officers, and obliged to get his grub himself from the galley, in the tin pot and kid of a common sailor. I used to talk with him as much as I had opportunity to, but his lot was wretched, and in every way wounding to his feelings. After our arrival, Captain Thompson was obliged to make him compensation for this treatment. It happens that I have never heard of him since.

Henry Mellus, who had been in a counting-house in Boston, and left the forecastle, on the coast, to be agent's clerk, and whom I met, a married man, at Los Angeles in 1859, died at that place a few years ago, not having been successful in commercial life. Ben Stimson left the sea for the fresh water and prairies, settled in Detroit as a merchant, and when I visited that city, in 1863, I was rejoiced to find him a prosperous and respected man, and the same generous-hearted s.h.i.+pmate as ever.

This ends the catalogue of the Pilgrim's original crew, except her first master, Captain Thompson. He was not employed by the same firm again, and got up a voyage to the coast of Sumatra for pepper. A cousin and cla.s.smate of mine, Mr. Channing, went as supercargo, not having consulted me as to the captain. First, Captain Thompson got into difficulties with another American vessel on the coast, which charged him with having taken some advantage of her in getting pepper; and then with the natives, who accused him of having obtained too much pepper for his weights.

The natives seized him, one afternoon, as he landed in his boat, and demanded of him to sign an order on the supercargo for the Spanish dollars that they said were due them, on pain of being imprisoned on sh.o.r.e. He never failed in pluck, and now ordered his boat aboard, leaving him ash.o.r.e, the officer to tell the supercargo to obey no direction except under his hand. For several successive days and nights, his s.h.i.+p, the Alciope, lay in the burning sun, with rain-squalls and thunder-clouds coming over the high mountains, waiting for a word from him. Toward evening of the fourth or fifth day he was seen on the beach, hailing for the boat. The natives, finding they could not force more money from him, were afraid to hold him longer, and had let him go. He sprang into the boat, urged her off with the utmost eagerness, leaped on board the s.h.i.+p like a tiger, his eyes flas.h.i.+ng and his face full of blood, ordered the anchor aweigh, and the topsails set, the four guns, two on a side, loaded with all sorts of devilish stuff, and wore her round, and, keeping as close into the bamboo village as he could, gave them both broadsides, slam-bang into the midst of the houses and people, and stood out to sea! As his excitement pa.s.sed off, headache, languor, fever, set in,-- the deadly coast-fever, contracted from the water and night-dews on sh.o.r.e and his maddened temper. He ordered the s.h.i.+p to Penang, and never saw the deck again. He died on the pa.s.sage, and was buried at sea. Mr.

Channing, who took care of him in his sickness and delirium, caught the fever from him, but, as we gratefully remember, did not die until the s.h.i.+p made port, and he was under the kindly roof of a hospitable family in Penang. The chief mate, also, took the fever, and the second mate and crew deserted; and, although the chief mate recovered and took the s.h.i.+p to Europe and home, the voyage was a melancholy disaster. In a tour I made round the world in 1859-1860, of which my revisit to California was the beginning, I went to Penang. In that fairy-like scene of sea and sky and sh.o.r.e, as beautiful as material earth can be, with its fruits and flowers of a perpetual summer,-- somewhere in which still lurks the deadly fever,-- I found the tomb of my kinsman, cla.s.smate, and friend. Standing beside his grave, I tried not to think that his life had been sacrificed to the faults and violence of another; I tried not to think too hardly of that other, who at least had suffered in death.

The dear old Pilgrim herself! She was sold, at the end of this voyage, to a merchant in New Hamps.h.i.+re, who employed her on short voyages, and, after a few years, I read of her total loss at sea, by fire, off the coast of North Carolina.

Captain Faucon, who took out the Alert, and brought home the Pilgrim, spent many years in command of vessels in the Indian and Chinese seas, and was in our volunteer navy during the late war, commanding several large vessels in succession, on the blockade of the Carolinas, with the rank of lieutenant. He has now given up the sea, but still keeps it under his eye, from the piazza of his house on the most beautiful hill in the environs of Boston. I have the pleasure of meeting him often. Once, in speaking of the Alert's crew, in a company of gentlemen, I heard him say that that crew was exceptional; that he had pa.s.sed all his life at sea, but whether before the mast or abaft, whether officer or master, he had never met such a crew, and never should expect to; and that the two officers of the Alert, long ago s.h.i.+pmasters, agreed with him that, for intelligence, knowledge of duty and willingness to perform it, pride in the s.h.i.+p, her appearance and sailing, and in absolute reliableness, they never had seen their equal. Especially he spoke of his favorite seaman, French John. John, after a few more years at sea, became a boatman, and kept his neat boat at the end of Granite Wharf, and was ready to take all, but delighted to take any of us of the old Alert's crew, to sail down the harbor.

One day Captain Faucon went to the end of the wharf to board a vessel in the stream, and hailed for John. There was no response, and his boat was not there. He inquired, of a boatman near, where John was. The time had come that comes to all! There was no loyal voice to respond to the familiar call, the hatches had closed over him, his boat was sold to another, and he had left not a trace behind. We could not find out even where he was buried.

Mr. Richard Brown, of Marblehead, our chief mate in the Alert, commanded many of our n.o.blest s.h.i.+ps in the European trade, a general favorite. A few years ago, while stepping on board his s.h.i.+p from the wharf, he fell from the plank into the hold and was killed. If he did not actually die at sea, at least he died as a sailor,-- he died on board s.h.i.+p.

Our second mate, Evans, no one liked or cared for, and I know nothing of him, except that I once saw him in court, on trial for some alleged petty tyranny towards his men,-- still a subaltern officer.

The third mate, Mr. Hatch, a nephew of one of the owners, though only a lad on board the s.h.i.+p, went out chief mate the next voyage, and rose soon to command some of the finest clippers in the California and India trade, under the new order of things,-- a man of character, good judgment, and no little cultivation.

Of the other men before the mast in the Alert, I know nothing of peculiar interest. When visiting, with a party of ladies and gentlemen, one of our largest line-of-battle s.h.i.+ps, we were escorted about the decks by a mids.h.i.+pman, who was explaining various matters on board, when one of the party came to me and told me that there was an old sailor there with a whistle round his neck, who looked at me and said of the officer, ''he can't show him anything aboard a s.h.i.+p.'' I found him out, and, looking into his sunburnt face, covered with hair, and his little eyes drawn up into the smallest pa.s.sages for light,-- like a man who had peered into hundreds of northeasters,-- there was old ''Sails'' of the Alert, clothed in all the honors of boatswain's-mate. We stood aside, out of the cun of the officers, and had a good talk over old times. I remember the contempt with which he turned on his heel to conceal his face, when the mids.h.i.+pman (who was a grown youth) could not tell the ladies the length of a fathom, and said it depended on circ.u.mstances.

Notwithstanding his advice and consolation to ''Chips,'' in the steerage of the Alert, and his story of his runaway wife and the flag-bottomed chairs (ante, p. 318), he confessed to me that he had tried marriage again, and had a little tenement just outside the gate of the yard.

Harry Bennett, the man who had the palsy, and was unfeelingly left on sh.o.r.e when the Alert sailed, came home in the Pilgrim, and I had the pleasure of helping to get him into the Ma.s.sachusetts General Hospital. When he had been there about a week, I went to see him in his ward, and asked him how he got along. ''Oh!

first-rate usage, sir; not a hand's turn to do, and all your grub brought to you, sir.'' This is a sailor's paradise,-- not a hand's turn to do, and all your grub brought to you. But an earthly paradise may pall. Bennett got tired of in-doors and stillness, and was soon out again, and set up a stall, covered with canvas, at the end of one of the bridges, where he could see all the pa.s.sers-by, and turn a penny by cakes and ale. The stall in time disappeared, and I could learn nothing of his last end, if it has come.

Of the lads who, beside myself, composed the gig's crew, I know something of all but one. Our bright-eyed, quick-witted little c.o.c.kswain, from the Boston public schools, Harry May, or Harry Bluff, as he was called, with all his songs and gibes, went the road to ruin as fast as the usual means could carry him. Nat, the ''bucket-maker,'' grave and sober, left the seas, and, I believe, is a hack-driver in his native town, although I have not had the luck to see him since the Alert hauled into her berth at the North End.

One cold winter evening, a pull at the bell, and a woman in distress wished to see me. Her poor son George,-- George Somerby,-- ''you remember him, sir; he was a boy in the Alert; he always talks of you,-- he is dying in my poor house.'' I went with her, and in a small room, with the most scanty furniture, upon a mattress on the floor,-- emaciated, ashy pale, with hollow voice and sunken eyes,-- lay the boy George, whom we took out a small, bright boy of fourteen from a Boston public school, who fought himself into a position on board s.h.i.+p (ante, p. 295), and whom we brought home a tall, athletic youth, that might have been the pride and support of his widowed mother. There he lay, not over nineteen years of age, ruined by every vice a sailor's life absorbs. He took my hand in his wasted feeble fingers, and talked a little with his hollow, death-smitten voice.

I was to leave town the next day for a fortnight's absence, and whom had they to see to them? The mother named her landlord,-- she knew no one else able to do much for them. It was the name of a physician of wealth and high social position, well known in the city as the owner of many small tenements, and of whom hard things had been said as to his strictness in collecting what he thought his dues.

Be that as it may, my memory a.s.sociates him only with ready and active beneficence. His name has since been known the civilized world over, from his having been the victim of one of the most painful tragedies in the records of the criminal law.[3] I tried the experiment of calling upon him; and, having drawn him away from the cheerful fire, sofa, and curtains of a luxurious parlor, I told him this simple tale of woe, of one of his tenants, unknown to him even by name. He did not hesitate; and I well remember how, in that biting, eager air, and at a late hour, he drew his cloak about his thin and bent form, and walked off with me across the Common, and to the South End, nearly two miles of an exposed walk, to the scene of misery. He gave his full share, and more, of kindness and material aid; and, as George's mother told me, on my return, had with medical aid and stores, and a clergyman, made the boy's end as comfortable and hopeful as possible.

The Alert made two more voyages to the coast of California, successful, and without a mishap, as usual, and was sold by Messrs. Bryant and Sturgis, in 1843, to Mr. Thomas W. Williams, a merchant of New London, Connecticut, who employed her in the whale-trade in the Pacific. She was as lucky and prosperous there as in the merchant service. When I was at the Sandwich Islands in 1860, a man was introduced to me as having commanded the Alert on two cruises, and his friends told me that he was as proud of it as if he had commanded a frigate.

I am permitted to publish the following letter from the owner of the Alert, giving her later record and her historic end,-- captured and burned by the rebel Alabama:--

New London, March 17, 1868.

Richard H. Dana, Esq.:

Dear Sir,-- I am happy to acknowledge the receipt of your favor of the 14th inst., and to answer your inquiries about the good s.h.i.+p Alert. I bought her of Messrs. Bryant and Sturgis, in the year 1843, for my firm of Williams and Haven, for a whaler, in which business she was successful until captured by the rebel steamer Alabama, September, 1862, making a period of more than nineteen years, during which she took and delivered at New London upwards of twenty-five thousand barrels of whale and sperm oil. She sailed last from this port, August 30, 1862, for Hurd's Island (the newly discovered land south of Kerguelen's), commanded by Edwin Church, and was captured and burned on the 9th of September following, only ten days out, near or close to the Azores, with thirty barrels of sperm oil on board, and while her boats were off in pursuit of whales.

The Alert was a favorite s.h.i.+p with all owners, officers, and men who had anything to do with her; and I may add almost all who heard her name asked if that was the s.h.i.+p the man went in who wrote the book called ''Two Years before the Mast''; and thus we feel, with you, no doubt, a sort of sympathy at her loss, and that, too, in such a manner, and by wicked acts of our own countrymen.