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, and 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.
249), 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. 231), 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.  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 the 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, 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.





End of The Project Gutenberg Etext of Two Years Before the Mast, by Dana

