Two Years Before the Mast
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 earthly 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 visit 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.
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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. 41), 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, 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