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 shore 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 nobler 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 passed 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 ship’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 principal houses of the gente de razon– of the Bandinis, Estudillos, Argüellos, 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 pulpería, 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-class 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 shipmate of mine, Jack Stewart, who went out as second mate the next voyage, but left the ship 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. Doña Tomasa Pico I found and talked with. She was the only person of the old upper class 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 ashore 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 passed through its canal and round Point Conception, stopping at San Luis Obispo to land my friend, as I may truly call him after this long passage 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, passed the light-houses and forts, and clipper ships 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 José, 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 Washington, 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 circumference without its bark, and the bark is usually eighteen inches thick; and rode through another which lay on the ground, a shell, 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 shimmer 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 cañons, 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 passage 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 noble Boston clipper ship 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 Massachusetts, 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 assembly 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 shore. He received me with true earnestness, and would not hear of my passing his estate without visiting him. He reminded me of a remark I made to him once, when pulling him ashore 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 José 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 titanic 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 washing 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 passed, 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 shores 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 embarrassed 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 shipmates 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 passed 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 ship 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 ashore. 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 ships, 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 ship; 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 space, 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 shipmate 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 classmate 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 shore. He never failed in pluck, and now ordered his boat aboard, leaving him ashore, the officer to tell the supercargo to obey no direction except under his hand. For several successive days and nights, his ship, 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 ship like a tiger, his eyes flashing 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 passed off, headache, languor, fever, set in,– the deadly coast-fever, contracted from the water and night-dews on shore and his maddened temper. He ordered the ship to Penang, and never saw the deck again. He died on the passage, 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 ship 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 ship 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 shore, 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, classmate, 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 Hampshire, 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 passed 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 shipmasters, agreed with him that, for intelligence, knowledge of duty and willingness to perform it, pride in the ship, 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 noblest ships in the European trade, a general favorite. A few years ago, while stepping on board his ship 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 ship.
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 ship, 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 ships, we were escorted about the decks by a midshipman, 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 ship.” I found him out, and, looking into his sunburnt face, covered with hair, and his little eyes drawn up into the smallest passages 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 midshipman (who was a grown youth) could not tell the ladies the length of a fathom, and said it depended on circumstances. 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 shore when the Alert sailed, came home in the Pilgrim, and I had the pleasure of helping to get him into the Massachusetts 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 passers-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 cockswain, 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 ship (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 associates 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 ship 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 ship 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 ship 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.
My partner, Mr. Haven, sends me a note from the office this P.M., saying that he had just found the last log-book, and would send up this evening a copy of the last entry on it; and if there should be anything of importance I will enclose it to you, and if you have any further inquiries to put, I will, with great pleasure, endeavor to answer them.
Remaining very respectfully and truly yours,
Thomas W. Williams.
P.S.– Since writing the above I have received the extract from the log-book, and enclose the same.
The last Entry in the Log-Book of the Alert.
“September 9, 1862.
“Shortly after the ship came to the wind, with the main yard aback, we went alongside and were hoisted up, when we found we were prisoners of war, and our ship a prize to the Confederate steamer Alabama. We were then ordered to give up all nautical instruments and letters appertaining to any of us. Afterwards we were offered the privilege, as they called it, of joining the steamer or signing a parole of honor not to serve in the army or navy of the United States. Thank God no one accepted the former of these offers. We were all then ordered to get our things ready in haste, to go on shore,– the ship running off shore all the time. We were allowed four boats to go on shore in, and when we had got what things we could take in them, were ordered to get into the boats and pull for the shore,– the nearest land being about fourteen miles off,– which we reached in safety, and, shortly after, saw the ship in flames.
“So end all our bright prospects, blasted by a gang of miscreants, who certainly can have no regard for humanity so long as they continue to foster their so-called peculiar institution, which is now destroying our country.”
I love to think that our noble ship, with her long record of good service and uniform success, attractive and beloved in her life, should have passed, at her death, into the lofty regions of international jurisprudence and debate, forming a part of the body of the “Alabama Claims”;– that, like a true ship, committed to her element once for all at her launching, she perished at sea, and, without an extreme use of language, we may say, a victim in the cause of her country.
R.H.D., Jr.
Boston, May 6, 1869.
[1] Pronounced Leese.
[2] This journal was of 1859 before Colonel Robert E. Lee became the celebrated General Lee in command of the Confederate forces in the Civil War.
[3] [Dr. George Parkman.]
SEVENTY-SIX YEARS AFTER
By the Author’s Son
In the preceding chapter, my father contrasted the solitary bay of San Francisco in 1835, its one, or at most, two vessels and one board hut on shore, with the city of San Francisco in 1859 of nearly one hundred thousand inhabitants and a fleet of large clipper ships and sail of all kind in the harbor, which he saw on his arrival in the steamer Golden Gate bringing the “fortnightly” “mails and passengers from the Atlantic world.” The contrast from 1859 to 1911 is hardly less striking. San Francisco has now grown to over four hundred thousand inhabitants, has twelve daily trains bringing mails and passengers from across the continent and beyond, and steamers six to ten times the size of the Golden Gate. In visiting San Pedro in 1859 he speaks of the landing at the head of a creek where boats discharged and took off cargoes from a mole or wharf, and of how “a tug ran to take off passengers from the steamer to the wharf, for the trade of Los Angeles is sufficient to support such a vessel.” From this landing, a stage-coach went daily to Los Angeles, a town of about twenty thousand inhabitants. Now there is a fine harbor at which large steamers themselves can land at San Pedro and a four-track electric road leading to Los Angeles, now a city of three hundred thousand inhabitants. Trains on this road go at the rate of sixty miles an hour. The picturesqueness, the Aladdin lamp character of the change, would not perhaps be heightened, but certainly the contrast is greater, if the days of 1835 be compared with 1911 instead of 1859, while the startling growth from 1859 to the present makes one pause to ask what will be the progress and the changes in the next fifty-two years.
Of the fate of the vessels since my father wrote “Twenty-four Years After,” little has come to our knowledge. Of the brig Pilgrim, he says, “I read of her total loss at sea by fire off the coast of North Carolina.” On the records of the United States Custom House at Boston is this epitaph, “Brig Pilgrim, owner, R. Haley, surrender of transfer 30 June 1856, broken up at Key West.” Is it not romantic and appropriate that this vessel, so associated with the then Mexican-Spanish coast of California, should have left her bones on the coast of the once Spanish colony of Florida?
A schoolmate of mine dwelling at Yokohama tells us of the fate of the ship Lagoda. This is the vessel that Captain Thompson of the Pilgrim came aboard and “brought his brig with him” (page 137), and to which poor Foster fled (page 154), in fear of being flogged. The Lagoda was under three hundred and forty tons, built at Scituate, Mass., in 1826, of oak with “bluff bows and square stern.” Later she was sold to a New Bedford owner, converted into a bark and turned into a whaler. In 1890, she came to Yokohama much damaged, was officially surveyed and pronounced not worth repair, was sold at auction and bought as a coal hulk for the Canadian Pacific Company’s steamers at that port, and in 1899 was sold to the Japanese, burned and broken up at Kanagawa. The fate of these vessels, with that of the Alert burned at sea by the Alabama, illustrates how vessels, as Ernest Thompson Seton says of wild animals, seldom fail to have a hard, if not a tragic, ending.
It may be interesting to state that the Ayacucho (pronounced I-ah-coo-tsho) was named after the battle fought December 9, 1824, in Peru, South America, in which the Spaniards were defeated by the armies of Columbia and Peru, which battle ended the Spanish rule in America. What became of her after she was sold to the Chilian government as a vessel of war, we do not know.
The Loriotte, we learn, was built at Plymouth, Mass., in 1828, was ninety-two tons, originally a schooner and later changed into an hermaphrodite brig. Gorham H. Nye, her captain and part owner, was born in Nantucket, Mass.
As to persons, there is little to add about Captain Thompson. Captain Faucon gave it as his opinion that Thompson was not a good navigator and that Thompson knew his sailors knew it, and to this cause he attributed in some measure Thompson’s hard treatment of the men. His navigation of the Alert some twelve or fifteen hundred miles westward of the usual course around Cape Horn on the return passage was an instance. It was much criticised by his sailors and officers. It not only greatly lengthened the total distance but brought the vessel into currents that were more antarctic and more frequented with ice than those currents nearer the southwest coast of South America, usually taken advantage of on the trip west to east. In 1880, on my visit to the scenes of “Two Years Before the Mast,” I met a nephew of Captain Thompson at Santa Barbara. He was then the proprietor of the hotel at which I stayed. He invited me to walk with him Sunday afternoon. When we started out together I noticed he had a large, thick cane, while I had none. Could it be he was to wreak vengeance on the son of the man who had exposed his uncle? I was strong and athletic after a year as stroke of the Freshman crew and three years as stroke of the University crew at Harvard. I kept my weather eye open and took care to be a little behind rather than ahead of my companion. At last he began on my father’s story, “Two Years Before the Mast,” and his uncle. Now it is coming, thought I, but to my surprise and relief he detailed a family trouble in which the uncle had tried to get into his own possession land which belonged in part to his brothers and of which he, the captain, had been placed in charge, and my friend, for so I could then think of him, wound up with saying my father had done his uncle perfect justice. The year of Captain Thompson’s death was 1837.
The chief mate of the Pilgrim on her outward voyage, Mr. Andrew B. Amerzeen, was born at Epsom, N.H., June 7, 1806. After returning in the Alert in 1836, as described by my father, his mother prevailed on him to give up long voyages, owing to the fact that his father, a ship owner and master, had been lost at sea with his ship a year or two before. Mr. Amerzeen then made several short voyages to the West Indies and in the fall of 1838 his ship was dismasted in a storm somewhere below Cape Hatteras. He was ill with yellow fever and confined to his stateroom at the time. The ship was worked into one of the southern ports, Savannah I am told, and there Mr. Amerzeen died September 27, 1838, from this fever.
“Jim Hall,” the sailor who was made second mate of the Pilgrim in Foster’s place, after several years’ successful career as Captain and Manager of the Pacific Steamship Navigation Company on the west coast of South America with the title of Commodore, returned to this country, having saved a competence, and settled at East Braintree, Massachusetts. He called on me at my office some ten years after my father’s death. He was six feet tall, a handsome man of striking appearance, with blue eyes, nearly white hair, a ruddy countenance, and a very straight figure for one of nearly eighty years of age. He was born at Pittston, Maine, July 4, 1813. He is said to have commanded twenty-seven different vessels, steam and sail, and never to have had an accident, “never cost the underwriters a dollar.” He died April 22, 1904. His wife (Mary Ann Kimball of Hookset, N.H.) survived him.
Of George P. Marsh, the new hand shipped at San Pedro October 22, 1835, the Englishman with a strange career, we have heard in a letter from Mr. Samuel C. Clarke of Chicago, passenger with Captain Low on the ship Cabot when she took Marsh from the Pelew Islands. Mr. Clarke kept a journal at the time, which confirms in almost every detail the story as told by Marsh, with one or two very minor exceptions but one important difference. He told them when first rescued that he was “a native of Providence, Rhode Island” in America, while to his shipmates in California he always said he was a native of England and brought up on a smuggler. By a letter from his nephew, Edward W. Boyd, we learn that his real name was George Walker Marsh, that he was the eldest son of a retired English army officer and his wife, and was born in St. Malo, France, hence his knowledge of the French language. He went to sea against their will but communicated with them several times afterwards. After he left to join the Ayacucho in Chili, all trace of him was lost at Valparaiso.
Captain Edward Horatio Faucon, who took out the Alert and brought back the Pilgrim, continued, after my father’s last chapter, to live at Milton Hill where he still kept “the sea under his eye from the piazza of his house.” He was occasionally employed by Boston marine underwriters on salvage cases, going to many places, from St. Thomas, W.I., and the Bermudas, to Nova Scotia in the north. He was a constant reader, chiefly interested in history, political economy and sociology. He made visits, annually or oftener, on my mother until his death on May 22, 1894. We all remember his keen eye, erect figure, quiet reserve, and old-time courtesy of manner, and his personal interest in those who come and go in ships, and more particularly in those of the Alert, his favorite ship. He was born in Boston, November 21, 1806. His father, Nicolas Michael Faucon, was a Frenchman of Rouen, who fought in the Napoleonic wars with distinction as Captain of the Second Regiment of the Hussars, and came to this country, where he married Miss Catherine Waters at Trinity Church, Boston. He was instructor in French at Harvard, 1806-1816. Our Captain Faucon left a widow and daughter, and a promising son, Gorham Palfrey Faucon, a Harvard graduate, a well-trained civil engineer in the employ of large railroads, and, like his father, interested in literature and public problems. He died in 1897, in the early prime of life.
The third mate, James Byers Hatch, whom Captain Faucon in a letter to us called “one of the best of men,” continued to command large sailing vessels on deep sea voyages with some mishaps and narrow escapes. While in California on one of these voyages he found James Hall on board another ship at the same wharf, and in a letter to Captain Faucon written June, 1893, says, “I persuaded him to take the first officer’s berth, and what an officer he was!! Everything went on like clockwork. I do not think I ever found the least fault with him during the whole time he was with me.” Captain Hatch lost his only son, a lad of seven, on a voyage to Calcutta. “The boy,” said he, “fell from the top of the house on the poop deck and died in about a week.” His wife and married daughter both died in 1881. He himself settled in Springfield, Mass., his birthplace, and lost almost all he had saved in some unsuccessful business venture in that city, and lived a rather lonely and sad life. In the above letter he said, “I am now ready and anxious to leave this earth and take my chance in the next.” He died at Springfield soon after 1894.
Benjamin Godfrey Stimson, the young sailor about my father’s age, was born in Dedham, Mass., March 19, 1816. It came naturally to him to go to sea, for his great-uncle Benjamin Stimson commanded the colonial despatch vessel under Pepperell, in the siege of Louisburg. After settling in Detroit in 1837, he married a Canadian lady (Miss Ives), owned many lake vessels, including the H. P. Baldwin, the largest bark of her day on the great lakes, and was Controller of that city from 1868 to 1870, during which time the city hall was built by him at less than estimated cost. He died December 13, 1871, leaving a widow and two sons, Edward I. and Arthur K. Stimson. The agent Alfred Robinson died in 1895.
Jack Stewart I met in San Diego on my visit there in 1881, as I have stated in the Introduction. He was quite a character in the “old” town and made a good deal of his being one of the crew of the Alert. He died January 2, 1892, leaving children and grandchildren. Henry Mellus, who went out before the mast and left the Pilgrim to be agent’s clerk ashore, and whom my father met at Los Angeles in 1859, was made mayor of that city the very next year.
Last, but not least, from the point of view of friendship, was my father’s “dear Kanaka” (Hope), whose life my father saved (by getting ship’s medicines from the mate, after Captain Thompson had refused to give them), and for whom he had so much real affection. The last mention we have of Hope is found in my father’s journal under date of May 24, 1842.
“Horatio E. Hale called. Been away four years as Philologist to the Exploring Expedition. Was in San Francisco three months ago and saw the Alert there collecting hides. Also saw `Hope’ the Kanaka mentioned in my `Two Years.’ Hope desired his Aikane to me– Remembered me well. Hale said his face lighted up as soon as my name was mentioned to him.”
As to all the rest of the officers and crews, they have doubtless all handed in their last account and taken passage across the Unknown Sea to the other world.
Of the “fascinating” Doña Angustias dela Guerra, whose graceful dancing with Don Juan Bandini in Santa Barbara during the ceremonies attending the marriage of her sister, Doña Anita with Mr. Robinson, the Agent, in January, 1836, my father describes (pages 300-305), something more is to be said.
On my visit to Santa Barbara in 1880, I had the privilege of seeing her. I was much impressed with her graceful carriage, her face still handsome, though she was then sixty-five years of age, with her dignity, calm self-possession, and above all with her true gentility of manner and evidently high character and purpose, together with a delightful humor, which shone in her eyes. General Sherman, in a letter as late as 1888, says of her, she “was the finest woman it has been my good fortune to know,” and Bayard Taylor in El Dorado (Putnam’s edition of 1884, page 141) writes, “she is a woman whose nobility of character, native vigor and activity of intellect, and above all, whose instinctive refinement,” etc.
In 1847, when our officers took possession of California, she, a Mexican, of the first Mexican family of California, took care of the first United States officer who died in Monterey, Lieutenant Colville J. Minor, an enemy to her country, for which service she received a letter of thanks from the First Military Governor, dated August 21, 1848.
She died January 21, 1890, at the age of seventy-five. The name of her first husband was Don Manuel Jimeno and of her second Dr. Ord. Caroline Jimeno was the daughter “as beautiful as her mother” that Mr. Dana met in 1859, then a young lady of seventeen. Her daughter by the second marriage, Rebecca R. Ord, an “infant in arms” when my father saw her in 1859, married Lieutenant John H. H. Peshine of the United States Army, who in 1893 was made First Military Attaché to the Court of Madrid.
The dela Guerra family of California, I am told, is dying out in the male line and will soon leave no representative.
As to Richard Henry Dana, Jr.,[1] the author of the book, the reader may wish to know something. He came back from his two years’ trip in 1836 “in a state of intellectual famine, to books and study and intercourse with educated men.” He had left his class at Harvard at the end of the sophomore year (1833), on account of the trouble with his eyes and sailed about a year later. When he returned, September, 1836, his class had graduated in the summer of 1835, but with a little study he passed the examinations for the then senior class, which he entered late in the autumn of 1836. On graduation in 1837 he not only stood first, but “had the highest marks that were given out in every branch of study.” He took the Bowdoin prize for English prose composition and the first Boylston prize in elocution. He then entered the Law School and became instructor in elocution under Professor Edward T. Channing, and during this period wrote the “Two Years Before the Mast.” In February, 1840, he went into the office of Charles G. Loring and in the following September opened his own office and began the active practice of law. He was born August 1, 1815, at Cambridge, Mass., with a line of ancestors reaching back to the early days of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, with several colonial governors in the maternal lines. His great grandfather, Richard Dana, was one of the early patriots, a “Son of Liberty,” who frequently presided at the meetings at Faneuil Hall at which Otis, Adams and others spoke. This man’s son, my father’s grandfather, Francis Dana, was several times member of the State Colonial Legislature and of the Continental Congress. He was one of the signers of the Articles of Confederation and married Elizabeth Ellery, the daughter of William Ellery, one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence. Francis Dana had been sent abroad on a special mission to England in 1774 before the breaking out of the Revolutionary War, to sound English public opinion, for which he had unusual advantages. He returned in the late spring of 1776 advising independence, and soon after this the Declaration of Independence was signed. Francis Dana was also appointed on a special mission to Paris and Holland with John Adams, later was made Minister to Russia, and after the peace with Great Britain was made Chief Justice of Massachusetts. Mr. Dana’s own father, Richard Henry Dana, Senior, was a poet and literary critic and a founder of the “North American Review.” Young Richard was brought up in very moderate circumstances. His grandfather, who had accumulated a good deal of property, lost the larger part of it through unfortunate investments in canals by a relation, in which he had himself become more deeply involved than he supposed. I remember my father’s saying that his spending money for one whole term consisted of twenty-five cents, which he carried in his pocket in cases of emergencies. He walked to and from Boston to save omnibus fares, had no carpet on his college room and had no chore-man to black his boots and fetch his water and fuel. This, however, was the usual custom in his day with all but the rich collegian. The necessities of life did not then demand so high a rate of “living wage” as to-day.
He entered on this sea experience with his eyes open. He had the opportunity of going on a long voyage as a passenger, but he refused it, and resolutely took the harder way of accomplishing his purpose of toughening himself. A little incident of his boyhood gives a hint of his pluck. His schoolmaster, angry at what he chose to call “disobedience” on the excuse of a “pretended” illness, told the boy to put out his left hand. “Upon this hand,” wrote Dana years afterward, “he inflicted six blows with all his strength, and then six upon the right hand. I was in such a frenzy of indignation at his injustice and his insulting insinuation, that I could not have uttered a word for my life. I was too small and slender to resist, and could show my spirit only by fortitude. He called for my right hand again, and gave six more blows in the same manner, and then six more upon the left. My hands were swollen and in acute pain, but I did not flinch nor show a sign of suffering. He was determined to conquer, and gave six more blows upon each hand, with full force. Still there was no sign from me of pain or submission. I could have gone to the stake for what I considered my honor. The school was in an uproar of hissing and scraping and groaning, and the master turned his attention to the other boys and let me alone. He said not another word to me through the day. If he had I could not have answered, for my whole soul was in my throat and not a word could get out. . . . I went in the afternoon to the trustees of the school, stated my case, produced my evidence, and had an examination made. The next morning but four boys went to school, and the day following the career of Mr. W. ended.”
That Dana had a keen sense of injustice not merely when he himself was concerned, but whenever he was brought face to face with injustice, the reader of this book has discovered for himself, and that a high sense of honor and right was a controlling passion of his life will appear when one knows his career after he returned from his long voyage. It rendered his attitude toward his profession, that of a lawyer, very different from that of a man merely seeking a livelihood.
Beside his work for the sailors to which I refer later there was another class of peculiarly helpless sufferers to make even stronger demand upon his sense of justice. By his social relations and by his strong antipathy to violence of every kind, Dana would naturally have found his place amongst the men who in politics prefer orderly and regular and especially respectable associations. He came into active life when a small band of earnest men and women were agitating for the abolition of slavery. Some among them were also attacking the church, and proposing all sorts of changes in society. But Dana was a man of strong religious principles and feelings, and he had little faith in any violent change in the social order. His diaries and letters of the period show that he was annoyed by the temper of the Abolitionists. They were not his kind. Nevertheless he was not a man to steer between two parties. In a great moral crisis he was sure to take sides. He took sides now and came out as a member of the Free Soil party. He made a distinction, which was a clear one, between the Free Soil party and the uncompromising Abolitionists. But in the rising heat of political feeling, other people did not make a like distinction, and Dana, a young lawyer, married now, and with a family growing up about him, found himself put out into the cold by the well-to-do, the successful, and the respectable.
Dana had a keen scent for politics, and he looked with the strongest interest upon the great political movement which was stirring the country; but he did not espouse the cause of free soil because he expected to profit by it politically. On the contrary, he knew that he was shutting himself out from political preferment by such a course, and at the same time was imperilling his professional success. It was the act of a man who stood up for the cause of righteousness, without counting the cost. In like manner he now had the opportunity of illustrating afresh his attitude toward the law, for he held that law was for the accomplishment of justice, and that it was most glorious when its strong arm protected and defended the weak and downtrodden. By a natural course, therefore, he became a prominent counsel for those unfortunate negroes who, at this time, in Boston, were held as fugitive slaves. While the ingenuity of some was expended in putting the law on the side of the strong and the rich, Dana, who was convinced in his mind that the law of the state was honestly to be invoked in defence of the fugitive slave, gave himself heart and soul to the work of applying the law, and received no remuneration for his services in any fugitive slave case. Instead, he received at the close of one of the most important cases, a blow from a blackguard which narrowly missed maiming him for life. It is worth while to read what Dana wrote after rendering all the aid he could in the defence of Anthony Burns: “The labors of a lawyer are ordinarily devoted to questions of property between man and man. He is to be congratulated if, though but for once, in any signal cause he can devote them to the vindication of any of the great primal rights affecting the highest interests of man.” He was a member of the noted Free Soil Convention at Buffalo of 1848, and presided at the first meeting of the Republican party in Massachusetts.
It may be a source of wonder to some that Dana, who achieved a great literary success in the book which he wrote when a young man, did not pursue literature as an avocation, if not as a vocation. He published but one other book, a narrative of a trip to Cuba made in 1859, and he wrote a few magazine articles. The explanation must be found in the temperament and character of the man. His “Two Years Before the Mast” is a vivid representation of what he saw and experienced at a most impressionable age. He put his young life into it; he was not thinking of literature when he wrote it, and thus the book takes rank with those books which are bits of life rather than products of art. Afterward he was immersed in his law practice, and he was a prodigious worker. He saw with great clearness the points in the cases he took up, and he was untiring in his industry to cover the whole case. He did all the work himself; he did not lay the details on others, and avail himself of their diligence. His time, moreover, as we have shown, was very much at the disposal of those who could pay him little or nothing for his services, and he gave months of labor to the unremunerative defence of the fugitive slave. Moreover, his deep religious conviction and his high sense of legal honor often stood in the way of his profit. So it was that his life was one of hard work and little more than support of his family. There was scant time for any wandering into fields of literature.
Yet he left behind him some other writings which show well that the hand which penned the “Two Years” never lost its cunning. He made an interesting visit to Europe, and, later in life, in 1859-60, made a journey round the world. The record which he kept on these journeys has been drawn upon largely in the biography[2] prepared by Charles Francis Adams, who was in his early days a student in Dana’s office, and there one finds page after page of delightfully animated description and narrative. He wrote for his own pleasure and for that of his family, and his writing was like brilliant talk, the outflow of a generous mind not easily saved for more common use. He published notes to Wheaton’s “International Law,” several of which are quoted in all new works on the subject to this day.
The journey which he took round the world was for the purpose of restoring his health, which had been greatly impaired. He came back in improved condition, and entered upon the excited period of the war, when he held the office of United States District Attorney. During this time he argued the famous prize causes before the United States Supreme Court, and his argument was the one that turned the Court, which was democratic in its politics, to take the unanimous view that the United States Government had a right to establish blockade and take prizes of foreign vessels that were breaking this blockade. Had it not been for this decision, so largely influenced, as the Court itself generously states, by Mr. Dana’s argument, the Civil War would have been greatly prolonged, with possibly another, or at least a doubtful issue. He afterward served in the Massachusetts legislature, and there made several noted speeches, among others his argument on the repeal of the usury laws, a bill for which was unexpectedly carried in that body as the result of this speech which has been reprinted for use before legislatures of other states.
He accepted a nomination to Congress, chiefly as a protest against the nomination of B. F. Butler, who was running on a paper money and repudiation platform against the principles of his own party, but Mr. Dana was defeated. In 1876 he was nominated by President Grant minister to England, but his nomination was not confirmed by the Senate, for his nomination had been made without consulting the Senatorial cabal and also he had bitter enemies, who carried on a warfare against him upon terms which he was too honorable to accept.
A selection of Mr. Dana’s speeches, the most interesting historically or those of most present value, have been published, together with a biographical sketch,[3] supplementing the Life written by Charles Francis Adams.
Two years later, broken now in health, but with his mind vigorous, he resolved to give up the practice of law and devote himself to writing a work on international law. For this purpose, and as a measure of economy, he went to Europe, and for two years applied himself diligently to his plan for a book which he believed would give some fundamentally new views on international law. He had made many notes and had begun to write the first few chapters when he died, after a short illness, from pneumonia, in Rome, January 6, 1882. He was buried in the beautiful Protestant cemetery of that city.
His wife, who was Sarah Watson of Hartford, Conn., survived him, and he left five daughters and a son. There are now nine of his grandchildren living (four of them Dana grandsons), and also four great-grandchildren.
Finally, what did Mr. Dana accomplish for sailors? In the preface to the first edition (1840) he said, “If it shall . . . call more attention to the welfare of seamen, or give any information as to their real condition which may serve to raise them in the rank of beings, and to promote in any measure their religious and moral improvement, and diminish the hardships of their daily life, the end of its publication will be answered.” And after the flogging at San Pedro, there was his vow (page 1252), “that, if God should ever give me the means, I would do something to redress the grievances and relieve the sufferings of that class of beings with whom my lot had so long been cast.” For redressing individual grievances he took the part of the sailor in many a lawsuit where his remuneration was often next to nothing, and by which action he incurred the ill will of possible future rich and influential clients. In his journal December 14, 1847, he says, “I often have a good deal to contend with in the slurs or open opposition of masters and owners of vessels whose seamen I undertake to defend or look after,” though he adds there were honorable exceptions. These cases he fought hard and bravely, and into them he put his whole mind, heart and soul. He could not have done better in them if he had been paid the highest fees known to the Bar. He settled as many of these cases out of court as he could. He believed any reasonable settlement better for the sailor than a legal contest, though his own fees would be less. Beside taking the part of the individual seamen, he published the “Seamen’s Friend,” a book giving the full legal rights of sailors as well as their duties, a set of definitions of sea terms, which to this day is quoted in all the dictionaries, and much information for the use of beginners. He drew up a petition and prepared an accompanying leaflet addressed to Congress for “The More Speedy Trial of Seamen.” He wrote numerous articles for the press and delivered many addresses on behalf of seamen, or for institutions for their benefit such as “Father” Taylor’s Bethel and for a more cordial reception of sailors in the church. He wrote the introduction of Leech’s “A Voice from the Main Deck,” but above all it was the indirect influence of his “Two Years Before the Mast” which did the most to relieve their hardships.
While on a trip in Europe in 1875-76, I spent some weeks in London and visited Parliament frequently to study the proceedings and see and hear its leading men. By a strange coincidence at my very first visit, made at the invitation of the late Sir William Vernon Harcourt, after I had sent in my card and was ushered into the inner lobby, I saw a man, evidently a member, rushing out into this lobby, and, to quote from my journal written at the time, “in a wild state of excitement, throwing about his arms and shaking his fists, with short ejaculations such as `I’ll expose the villains, all of them,’ and I heard the words `Cheats!’ and I think `Liars!”’ This was a strange introduction to the then decorous British House of Commons, for this was before the active days of Parnell. I saw poor, blind Henry Fawcett[4] and others trying to calm the man. The lobby was immediately cleared of strangers, so I saw no more just then, but I was later admitted into the House and learned that this man was the famous Plimsoll (1824-1898). He had become enraged because his Merchants’ Shipping Bill had just been thrown out by Disraeli, then Prime Minister, on this day of the so-called “Slaughter of the Innocents,” that is, the day when the Government abandoned all bills which they were not to carry out that session. Justin McCarthy, in his “History of Our Own Times” (Vol. IV, page 24, et seq.), gives a full account of this scene. Plimsoll’s Bill was a measure for the protection of seamen against the danger of being sent to sea in vessels unfit for the voyage. To understand the whole situation of the sailor in civilized countries, one must know that the only way allowed by law or custom for him to get employment is to sign articles sometimes without even knowing the name of the vessel, and almost always without an opportunity to examine or even see her. Once having signed these papers, sailors are by law compelled to keep their contracts and can be imprisoned and sent aboard if they try to escape. Every other person in every other kind of employment, since the abolition of slavery, signing similar papers has a right to refuse to carry out his agreement, with no other penalty than a suit for damages. He cannot be forced to carry out the contract in person. If this were not so, there would be a sort of contract peonage or slavery endorsed by the law. It is otherwise, however, with the sailors. The United States Supreme Court in the case of Robertson v. Baldwin (165 U.S. 275, 1896) decided, Judge Harlan dissenting, that notwithstanding the thirteenth amendment to the Constitution which, it was supposed, had prohibited involuntary servitude except as punishment for crime, sailors could be forced on board of vessels, and the facts that the vessel was unfit for living, the food bad, and the master brutal were no defences. The headnote of the case says, “The contract of a sailor has always been treated as an exceptional one involving to a certain extent the surrender of his personal liberty during the life of his contract.” Mr. Plimsoll was rightly convinced that unseaworthy vessels left port for the sake of insurance money on valued policies, that the lives of the seamen were thereby imperilled, and that the poor sailor had no redress before the law. The bill that had just been thrown out by Disraeli provided that if one-quarter of the seamen appealed on the ground of unseaworthiness a survey would be ordered, the vessel detained till the survey was made, and if she were unseaworthy or improperly provisioned the sailors would be relieved from their contract unless those defects were cured. It also had other minor provisions for the benefit of the sailors. In Parliament that night, it was thought that Plimsoll’s wild conduct had destroyed his reputation as a sane man and had ruined the chances of ever passing his bill, but outside of Parliament the effect was just the reverse. The public was aroused to a full understanding of the essential merits of his bill and the government was forced to put it on the calendar and carry it through that session in its substantial features, and the following year (1876) a more complete and perfected act covering the same points was passed.
In the United States, a most interesting character, Andrew Furuseth, a Norwegian, himself a sailor, and without much education but a man of wonderful force, has succeeded, largely by the aid of labor unions, in forcing through Congress bills by which no American seaman can any longer be forced against his will into this servitude nor any foreign seaman on domestic voyages. Another evil tending to degrade and enslave the sailor was the allowance made by law of three months’ advance wages on beginning a voyage. This apparently harmless and, to the credulous and inexperienced legislator, beneficial provision gave a chance to the sailors’ boarding-house keeper and runner, or “crimp,” as he or she is called, to “shanghai” seamen and put them aboard drunk or drugged, with little or no clothing but what they had on their backs and rob them of this advance money. The “crimps”’ share of this money in San Francisco alone has been calculated at one million dollars a year, or equal to eighty per cent of the seamen’s entire wages. Part of this had to be shared with corrupt police and politicians and some of it has been traced to sources “higher up.” So common was this practice that vessels sailing from San Francisco and New York had so few sober sailors aboard, that it was customary to take longshoremen to set sail, heave anchor and get the ship under way, and then send them back by tug. This is precisely what happened on the well-equipped and new ship on which I sailed from New York in 1879 for California, and the same situation is described by Captain Arthur H. Clark in his account of seamen in his “Clipper Ship Era.” These poor sailors, without proper clothing, had to draw on the ship’s “slop chest” for necessary oilskins, thick jackets, mittens and the like, and used up almost all the rest of their wages. The small balance was wasted or stolen, or both, at the port of arrival, and off they were shipped again by the “crimp” with no chance to save or improve their condition. After years of agitation by the friends of sailors the advance pay is now wholly abolished in the coastwise trade in America and the three months’ advance cut down to one in the foreign trade, immensely to the benefit of the sailor and the discouragement of the “crimp.” The argument that without this system of bondage and “crimpage” it would be impossible to secure crews is fully answered by the experience of Great Britain since the passage of the Plimsoll Acts and in the United States since the recent acts of Congress. On the contrary, these measures tend to secure a better class of sailors and compel improvement of the conditions under which they do their work. I was told when in England that Plimsoll, who himself was not a sailor, was influenced among other things by my father’s book “Two Years Before the Mast.”
THE END
[1] He was Richard Henry Dana, Jr., when he wrote his book, and continued to be called so through life, for his father, a poet and littérateur, lived to the age of ninety-two, and died but three years before his son.
[2] Richard Henry Dana, Jr. A Biography. By Charles Francis Adams. In two volumes. Boston and New York: Houghton, Mifflin Company.
[3] Speeches in Stirring Times and Letters to a Son. Richard H. Dana, Jr. Boston and New York: Houghton, Mifflin Company, 1910.
[4] The political economist and M.P.