A LOG IN THE ARCHIPELAGO.
The American frigate, in which I had cruised as
the ward-room guest for more than six months, had
sailed for winter quarters at Mahon, and my name was
up at the pier of Smyrna, as a passenger in the first
ship that should leave the port, whatever her destination.
The flags of all nations flew at the crowded peaks of
the merchantmen lying off the Marina, and among them
lay two small twin brigs, loading with figs and opium
for my native town in America. They were owned by
an old schoolfellow of my own, one of the most distinguished
and hospitable of the Smyrniote merchants,
and, if nothing more adventurous turned up, he had
offered to land me from one of his craft at Malta or
Gibraltar.
Time wore on, and I had loitered up and down the
narrow street “in melancholy idleness” by day, and
smoked the narghile with those “merchant princes”
by night, till I knew every paving-stone between the
beach and the bazar, and had learned the thrilling
events of the Greek persecution with the particularity
of a historian. My heart, too, unsusceptible enough
when “packed for travel,” began to uncoil with absence
of adventure, and expose its sluggish pulses to
the “Greek fire,” still burning in those Asiatic eyes,
and I felt sensibly, that if, Telemachus-like, I did not
soon throw myself into the sea, I should yield, past
praying for, to the cup of some Smyrniote Circe.
Darker eyes than are seen on that Marina swim not in
delight out of paradise!
I was sitting on an opium-box in the counting-house
of my friend L—n (the princely and hospitable merchant
spoken of above), when enter a Yankee “skipper,”
whom I would have clapped on the shoulder for
a townsman if I had seen him on the top of the minaret
of the mosque of Sultan Bajazet. His go-ashore black
coat and trowsers, worn only one month in twelve,
were of costly cloth, but of the fashion prevailing in
the days of his promotion to be second mate of a cod-fisher;
his hat was of the richest beaver, but getting
brown with the same paucity of wear, and exposure to
the corroding air of the ocean; and on his hands were
stretched (and they had well need to be elastic) a pair
of Woodstock gloves that might have descended to
him from Paul Jones “the pilot.” A bulge just over
his lowest rib gave token of the ship's chronometer,
and, in obedience to the new fashion of a guard, a fine
chain of the softest auburn hair (doubtless his wife's,
and, I would have wagered my passage-money, as pretty
a woman as he would see in his v'yage)—a chain, I
say, braided of silken blond ringlets passed around his
neck, and drew its glossy line over his broad-breasted
white waistcoat—the dewdrop on the lion's mane not
more entitled to be astonished.
A face of hard-weather, but with an expression of
care equal to the amount of his invoice, yet honest and
fearless as the truck of his mainmast; a round sailor's
back, that looked as if he would hoist up his deck if
you battered him beneath hatches against his will;
and teeth as white as his new foresail, completed the
picture of the master of the brig Metamora. Jolly old
H—t, I shall never feel the grip of an honester hand,
nor return one (as far as I can with the fist you crippled
at parting) with a more kindly pressure! A fair
wind on your quarter, my old boy, wherever you may
be trading!
“What sort of accommodations have you, captain?”
I asked, as my friend introduced me.
“Why, none to speak of, sir! There's a starboard
birth that a'n't got much in it—a few boxes of figs, and
the new spritsail, and some of the mate's traps—but I
could stow away a little perhaps, sir.”
“You sail to-morrow morning?”
“Off with the land-breeze, sir.”
I took leave of the kindest of friends, laid in a few
hasty stores, and was on board at midnight. The next
morning I awoke with the water rippling beside me,
and creeping on deck, I saw a line of foam stretching
behind us far up the gulf, and the ruins of the primitive
church of Smyrna, mingled with the turrets of a
Turkish castle, far away in the horizon.
The morning was cool and fresh, the sky of an oriental
purity, and the small low brig sped on like a
nautilus. The captain stood by the binnacle, looking
off to the westward with a glass, a tarpaulin hat over
his black locks, a pair of sail-cloth pumps on his feet,
and trowsers and roundabout of an indefinable tarriness
and texture. He handed me the glass, and, obeying
his direction, I saw, stealing from behind a point of
land, shaped like a cat's back, the well-known topsails
of the two frigates that had sailed before us.
We were off Vourla, and the commodore had gone
to pay his respects to Sir Pulteney Malcolm, then lying
with his fleet in this little bay, and waiting, we
supposed, for orders to force the Dardanelles. The
frigates soon appeared on the bosom of the gulf, and
heading down, neared our larboard bow, and stood for
the Archipelago. The Metamora kept her way, but
the “United States,” the fleetest of our ships, soon
left us behind with a strengthening breeze, and, following
her with the glass till I could no longer distinguish
the cap of the officer of the deck, I breathed a
blessing after her, and went below to breakfast. It is
strange how the lessening in the distance of a ship in
which one has cruised in these southern seas, pulls on
the heartstrings!
I sat on deck most of the day, cracking pecan-nuts
with the captain, and gossiping about schooldays in
our native town, occasionally looking off over the hills
of Asia Minor, and trying to realize (the Ixion labor of
the imagination in travel) the history of which these
barren lands have been the scene. I know not whether
it is easy for a native of old countries to people these
desolated lands from the past, but for me, accustomed
to look on the face of the surrounding earth as mere
vegetation, unstoried and unassociated, it is with a constant
mental effort alone that I can be classic on classic
ground—find Plato in the desert wastes of the
Academy, or Priam among the Turk-stridden and
prostrate columns of Troy. In my recollections of
Athens, the Parthenon and the Theseion and the solemn
and sublime ruins by the Fount of Callirhoe stand
forth prominent enough; but when I was on the spot
—a biped to whom three meals a day, a washerwoman,
and a banker, were urgent necessities—I shame
to confess that I sat dangling my legs over the classic
Pelasgicum, not “fishing for philosophers with gold
and figs,” but musing on the mundane and proximate
matters of daily economy. I could see my six shirts
hanging to dry, close by the temple of the Winds, and
I knew my dinner was cooking three doors from the
crumbling capitals of the Agora.
As the sun set over Ephesus, we neared the mouth
of the gulf of Smyrna, and the captain stood looking
over the leeward-bow rather earnestly.
“We shall have a snorter out of the nor'east,” he
said, taking hold of the tiller, and sending the helmsman
forward—“I never was up this sea but once
afore, and it's a dirty passage through these islands in
any weather, let alone a Levanter.”
He followed up his soliloquy by jamming his tiller
hard a port, and in ten minutes the little brig was running
her nose, as it seemed to me, right upon an inhospitable
rock at the northern headland of the gulf.
At the distance of a biscuit-toss from the shore, however,
the rock was dropped to leeward, and a small
passage appeared, opening with a sharp curve into
the miniature but sheltered bay of Fourgas. We
dropped anchor off a small hamlet of forty or fifty
houses, and lay beyond the reach of Levanters in a
circular basin that seemed shut in by a rim of granite
from the sea.
The captain's judgment of the weather was correct,
and, after the sun set, the wind rose gradually to a violence
which sent the spray high over the barriers of
our protected position. Congratulating ourselves that
we were on the right side of the granite wall, we got
out our jolly-boat on the following morning, and ran
ashore upon the beach half a mile from town, proposing
to climb first to the peak of the neighboring hill,
and then forage for a dinner in the village below.
We scrambled up the rocky mountain-side, with
some loss of our private stock of wind, and considerable
increase from the nor'easter, and getting under the
lee of a projecting shelf, sat looking over toward Lesbos,
and ruminating in silence—I, upon the old question,
“an Sappho publica fuerit,” and the captain probably
on his wife at Cape Cod, and his pecan-nuts, figs,
and opium, in the emerald-green brig below us. I
don't know why she should have been painted green,
by-the-by (and I never thought to suggest that to the
captain), being named after an Indian chief, who was
as red as her copper bottom.
The sea toward Mitylene looked as wild as an eagle's
wing ruffling against the wind, and there was that
smoke in the sky as if the blast was igniting with its
speed—the look of a gale in those seas when unaccompanied
with rain. The crazy-looking vessels of
the Levant were scudding with mere rags of sails for
the gulf; and while we sat on the rock, eight or ten
of those black and unsightly craft shot into the little
bay below us, and dropped anchor—blessing, no doubt,
every saint in the Greek calendar.
Having looked toward Lesbos an hour, and come to
the conclusion, that, admitting the worst with regard
to the private character of Sappho, it would have been
very pleasant to have known her; and the captain
having washed his feet in a slender tricklet oozing
from a cleft in a rock, we descended the hill on the
other side, and stole a march on the rear to the town
of Fourgas. Four or five Greek women were picking
up olives in a grove lying half way down the hill, and
on our coming in sight, they made for us with such
speed, that I feared the reverse of the Sabine rape—
not yet having seen a man on this desolate shore; they
ran well, but they resembled Atalanta in no other possible
particular. We should have taken them for the
Furies, but there were five. They wanted snuff and
money—making signs easily for the first, but attempting
amicably to put their hands in our pockets when
we refused to comprehend the Greek for “Give us a
para.” The captain pulled from his pocket an American
dollar-note (payable at Nantucket), and offered it
to the youngest of the women, who smelt at it and returned
it to him, evidently unacquainted with the Cape
Cod currency. On farther search he found a few of
the tinsel paras of the country, which he substituted
for his “dollar-bill,” a saving of ninety-nine cents to
him, if the bank has not broke when he arrives at Massachusetts.
Fourgas is surrounded by a very old wall, very much
battered. We passed under a high arch containing
marks of having once been closed with a heavy gate
and, disputing our passage with cows, and men that
seemed less cleanly and civilized, penetrated to the
heart of the town in search of the barber's shop, café
and kibaub shop—three conveniences usually united
in a single room and dispensed by a single Figaro in
Turkish and Greek towns of this description. The
word café is universal, and we needed only to pronounce
it to be led by a low door into a square apartment
of a ruinous old building, around which, upon a
kind of shelf, waist-high, sat as many of the inhabitants
of the town as could cross their legs conveniently.
As soon as we were discerned through the smoke by
the omnifarious proprietor of the establishment, two
of the worst-dressed customers were turned off the
shelf unceremoniously to make room for us, the fire
beneath the coffeepot was raked open, and the agreeable
flavor of the spiced beverage of the east ascended
refreshingly to our nostrils. With his baggy trowsers
tucked up to his thigh, his silk shirt to his armpits,
and his smoke-dried but clean feet wandering at large
in a pair of red morocco slippers, our Turkish Ganymede
presented the small cups in their filagree holders,
and never was beverage more delicious or more
welcome. Thirsty with our ramble, and unaccustomed
to such small quantities as seem to satisfy the
natives of the east, the captain and myself soon became
objects of no small amusement to the wondering beards
about us. A large tablespoon holds rather more than
a Turkish coffee-cup, and one, or, at most, two of
these, satisfies the dryest clay in the Orient. To us,
a dozen of them was a bagatelle, and we soon exhausted
the copper pot, and intimated to the astonished
cafidji that we should want another. He looked
at us a minute to see if we were in earnest, and then
laid his hand on his stomach, and rolling up his eyes,
made some remark to his other customers which provoked
a general laugh. It was our last “lark” ashore
for some time, however, and spite of this apparent
prophecy of a colic, we smoked our
narghiles and
kept him running with his fairy cups for some time
longer. One never gets enough of that fragrant liquor.
The sun broke through the clouds as we sat on the
high bench, and, hastily paying our Turk, we hurried
to the seaside. The wind seemed to have lulled, and
was blowing lightly off shore; and, impatient of loitering
on his voyage, the captain got up his anchor and
ran across the bay, and in half an hour was driving
through a sea that left not a dry plank on the deck of
the Metamora.
The other vessels at Fourgas had not stirred, and
the sky in the northeast looked to my eye very threatening.
It was the middle of the afternoon, and the
captain crowded sail and sped on like a sea-bird,
though I could see by his face when he looked in the
quarter of the wind, that he had acted more from impulse
than judgment in leaving his shelter. The heavy
sea kicked us on our course, however, and the smart
little brig shot buoyantly over the crests of the waves
as she outran them, and it was difficult not to feel that
the bounding and obedient fabric beneath our feet was
instinct with self-confidence, and rode the waters like
their master.
I well knew that the passage of the Archipelago was
a difficult one in a storm even to an experienced pilot,
and with the advantage of daylight; and I could not
but remember with some anxiety that we were entering
upon it at nightfall, and with a wind strengthening
every moment, while the captain confessedly had made
the passage but once before, and then in a calm sea of
August. The skipper, however, walked his deck confidently,
though he began to manage his canvass with a
more wary care, and, before dark, we were scudding
under a single sail, and pitching onward with the heave
of the sea at a rate that, if we were to see Malta at all,
promised a speedy arrival. As the night closed in we
passed a large frigate lying-to, which we afterward
found out was the Superbe, a French eighty-gun ship
(wrecked a few hours after on the island of Andros).
The two American frigates had run up by Mitylene,
and were still behind us: and the fear of being run
down in the night, in our small craft, induced the
captain to scud on, though he would else have lain-to
with the Frenchman, and perhaps have shared his
fate.
I stayed on deck an hour or two after dark, and before
going below satisfied myself that we should owe
it to the merest chance if we escaped striking in the
night. The storm had become so furious that we ran
with bare poles before it; and though it set us pretty
fairly on our way, the course lay through a narrow
and most intricate channel, among small and rocky
islands, and we had nothing for it but to trust to a
providential drift.
The captain prepared himself for a night on deck,
lashed everything that was loose, and filled the two
jugs suspended in the cabin, which, as the sea had
been too violent for any hope from the cook, were to
sustain us through the storm. We took a biscuit and
a glass of Hollands and water, holding on hard by the
berths lest we should be pitched through the skylight,
and as the captain tied up the dim lantern, I got a
look at his face, which would have told me, if I had
not known it before, that though resolute and unmoved,
he knew himself to be entering on the most
imminent hazard of his life.
The waves now broke over the brig at every heave,
and occasionally the descent of the solid mass of water
on the quarter-deck seemed to drive her under like a
cork. My own situation was the worst on board, for
I was inactive. It required a seaman to keep the deck,
and as there was no standing in the cabin without great
effort, I disembarrassed myself of all that would impede
a swimmer, and got into my berth to await a wreck
which I considered almost inevitable. Braced with
both hands and feet, I lay and watched the imbroglio
in the bottom of the cabin, my own dressing-case
among other things emptied of its contents and swimming
with some of my own clothes and the captain's,
and the water rushing down the companion-way with
every wave that broke over us. The last voice I heard
on deck was from the deep throat of the captain calling
his men aft to assist in lashing the helm, and then,
in the pauses of the gale, came the awful crash upon
deck, more like the descent of a falling house than a
body of water, and a swash through the scuppers immediately
after, seconded by the smaller sea below, in
which my coat and waistcoat were undergoing a rehearsal
of the tragedy outside.
At midnight the gale increased, and the seas that descended
on the brig shook her to the very keel. We
could feel her struck under by the shock, and reel and
quiver as she recovered and rose again; and, as if to
distract my attention, the little epitome of the tempest
going on in the bottom of the cabin grew more and
more serious. The unoccupied berths were packed
with boxes of figs and bags of nuts, which “brought
away” one after another, and rolled from side to side
with a violence which threatened to drive them through
the side of the vessel; my portmanteau broke its lashings
and shot heavily backward and forward with the
roll of the sea; and if I was not to be drowned like a
dog in a locked cabin, I feared, at least, I should have
my legs broken by the leap of a fig-box into my berth.
My situation was wholly uncomfortable, yet half ludicrous.
An hour after midnight the captain came down, pale
and exhausted, and with no small difficulty managed
to get a tumbler of grog.
“How does she head?” I asked.
“Side to wind, drifting five knots an hour.”
“Where are you?”
“God only knows. I expect her to strike every
minute.”
He quietly picked up the wick of the lamp as it
tossed to and fro, and watching the roll of the vessel,
gained the companion-way, and mounted to the deck.
The door was locked, and I was once more a prisoner
and alone.
An hour elapsed—the sea, it appeared to me,
strengthening in its heaves beneath us, and the wind
howling and hissing in the rigging like a hundred
devils. An awful surge then burst down upon the
deck, racking the brig in every seam: the hurried
tread of feet overhead told me that they were cutting
the lashings of the helm; the seas succeeded each
other quicker, and, conjecturing from the
shortness of the pitch, that we were nearing a reef, I
was half out of my berth when the cabin door was
wrenched open, and a deluging sea washed down the
companion-way.
“On deck for your life!” screamed the hoarse voice
of the captain.
I sprang up through streaming water, barefoot and
bareheaded, but the pitch of the brig was so violent
that I dared not leave the ropes of the companion ladder,
and, almost blinded with the spray and wind, I
stood waiting for the stroke.
“Hard down!” cried the captain in a voice I shall
never forget, and as the rudder creaked with the strain,
the brig fell slightly off, and rising with a tremendous
surge, I saw the sky dimly relieved against the edge
of a ragged precipice, and in the next moment, as if
with the repulse of a catapult, we were flung back
into the trough of the sea by the retreating wave, and
surged heavily beyond the rock. The noise of the
breakers, and the rapid commands of the captain
now drowned the hiss of the wind, and in a few minutes
we were plunging once more through the uncertain
darkness, the long and regular heavings of
the sea alone assuring us that we were driving from
the shore.
The wind was cold, and I was wet to the skin.
Every third sea broke over the brig and added to the
deluge in the cabin, and from the straining of the
masts I feared they would come down with every succeeding
shock. I crept once more below, and regained
my berth, where wet and aching in every joint, I
awaited fate or the daylight.
Morning broke, but no abatement of the storm.
The captain came below and informed me (what I had
already presumed) that we had run upon the southernmost
point of Negropont, and had been saved by a
miracle from shipwreck. The back wave had taken
us off, and with the next sea we had shot beyond it.
We were now running in the same narrow channel for
Cape Colonna, and were surrounded with dangers.
The skipper looked beaten out; his eyes were protruding
and strained, and his face seemed to me to have
emaciated in the night. He swallowed his grog, and
flung himself for half an hour into his berth, and then
went on deck again to relieve his mate, where tired of
my wretched berth, I soon followed him.
The deck was a scene of desolation. The bulwarks
were carried clean away, the jolly-boat swept off, and
the long-boat the only moveable thing remaining.
The men were holding on to the shrouds, haggard and
sleepy, clinging mechanically to their support as the
sea broke down upon them, and, silent at the helm,
stood the captain and the second mate keeping the
brig stern-on to the sea, and straining their eyes for
land through the thick spray before them.
The day crept on, and another night, and we passed
it like the last. The storm never slacked, and all
through the long hours the same succession went on,
the brig plunging and rising, struggling beneath the
overwhelming and overtaking waves, and recovering
herself again, till it seemed to me as if I had never
known any other motion. The captain came below
for his biscuit and grog and went up again without
speaking a word, the mates did the same with the same
silence, and at last the bracing and holding on to prevent
being flung from my berth became mechanical,
and I did it while I slept. Cold, wet, hungry, and
exhausted, what a blessing from Heaven were five
minutes of forgetfulness!
How the third night wore on I scarce remember.
The storm continued with unabated fury, and when
the dawn of the third morning broke upon us the captain
conjectured that we had drifted four hundred
miles before the wind. The crew were exhausted
with watching, the brig labored more and more heavily,
and the storm seemed eternal.
At noon of the third day the clouds broke up a little,
and the wind, though still violent, slacked somewhat
in its fury. The sun struggled down upon the lashed
and raging sea, and, taking our bearings, we found ourselves
about two hundred miles from Malta. With
great exertions, the cook contrived to get up a fire in
the binnacle and boil a little rice, and never gourmet
sucked the brain of a woodcock with the relish which
welcomed that dark mess of pottage.
It was still impossible to carry more than a hand's
breadth of sail, but we were now in open waters and
flew merrily before the driving sea. The pitching and
racking motion, and the occasional shipping of a heavy
wave, still forbade all thoughts or hopes of comfort,
but the dread of shipwreck troubled us no more, and
I passed the day in contriving how to stand long
enough on my legs to get my wet traps from my
floating portmanteau, and go into quarantine like a
Christian.
The following day, at noon, Malta became visible
from the top of an occasional mountain wave; and still
driving under a reefed topsail before the hurricane, we
rapidly neared it, and I began to hope for the repose
of terra firma. The watch towers of the castellated
rock soon became distinct through the atmosphere of
spray, and at a distance of a mile, we took in sail and
waited for a pilot.
While tossing in the trough of the sea the following
half hour, the captain communicated to me some embarrassment
with respect to my landing which had not
occurred to me. It appeared that the agreement to
land me at Malta was not mentioned in his policy of
insurance, and the underwriters of course were not responsible
for any accident that might happen to the
brig after a variation from his original plan of passage.
This he would not have minded if he could have set
me ashore in a half hour, as he had anticipated, but
his small boat was lost in the storm, and it was now a
question whether the pilot-boat would take ashore a
passenger liable to quarantine. To run his brig into
harbor would be a great expense and positive loss of
insurance, and to get out the long-boat with his broken
tackle and exhausted crew was not to be thought of.
I knew very well that no passenger from a plague port
(such as Smyrna and Constantinople) was permitted
to land on any terms at Gibraltar, and if the pilot here
should refuse to take me off, the alternative was clear,
I must make a voyage against my will to America!
I was not in a very pleasant state of mind during the
delay which followed; for, though I had been three
years absent from my country and loved it well, I had
laid my plans for still two years of travel on this side
the Atlantic, and certain moneys for my “charges” lay
waiting my arrival at Malta. Among lesser reasons,
I had not a rag of clothes dry or clean, and was
heartily out of love with salt water and the smell of
figs.
As if to aggravate my unhappiness, the sun broke
through a rift in the clouds and lit up the white and
turreted battlements of Malta like an isle of the blessed
—the only bright spot within the limits of the stormy
horizon. The mountain waves on which we were
tossing were tempestnous and black, the comfortless
and battered brig with her weary crew looked more
like a wreck than a seaworthy merchantman, and no
pilot appearing, the captain looked anxiously seaward,
as if he grudged every minute of the strong wind rushing
by on his course.
A small speck at last appeared making toward us
from the shore, and, riding slowly over the tremendous
waves, a boat manned by four men came within hailing
distance. One moment as high as our topmast, and
another in the depths of the gulf a hundred feet below
us, it was like conversing from two buckets in a well.
“Do you want a pilot?” screamed the Maltese in
English, as the American flag blew out to the wind
“No!” roared the captain, like a thunder-peal,
through his tin-trumpet.
The Maltese, without deigning another look, put
up his helm with a gesture of disappointment, and
bore away.
“Boat ahoy!” bellowed the captain.
“Ahoy! ahoy!” answered the pilot.
“Will you take a passenger ashore?”
“Where from?”
“Smyrna!”
“No—o—o—o!”
There was a sound of doom in the angry prolongation
of that detested monosyllable that sunk to the
bottom of my heart like lead.
“Clear away the mainsail,” cried the captain getting
round once more to the wind. “I knew how it
would be, sir,” he continued, to me, as I bit my lips in
the effort to be reconciled to an involuntary voyage of
four thousand miles; “it wasn't likely he'd put himself
and his boat's crew into twenty days' quarantine
to oblige you and me.”
I could not but own that it was an unreasonable expectation.
“Never mind, sir,” said the skipper, consolingly,
“plenty of salt fish in the locker, and I'll set you on
Long Wharf in no time!”
“Brig ahoy!” came a voice faintly across the waves.
The captain looked over his shoulder without losing
a capful of wind from his sail, and sent back the hail
impatiently.
The pilot was running rapidly down upon us, and
had come back to offer to tow me ashore in the brig's
jolly-boat for a large sum of money.
“We've lost our boat, and you're a bloody shark,”
answered the skipper, enraged at the attempt at extortion.
“Head your course!” he muttered gruffly to
the man at the helm, who had let the brig fall off that
the pilot might come up.
Irritated by this new and gratuitous disappointment,
I stamped on the deck in an ungovernable fit of rage,
and wished the brig at the devil.
The skipper looked at me a moment, and instead of
the angry answer I expected, an expression of kind
commiseration stole over his rough face. The next
moment he seized the helm and put the brig away
from the wind, and then making a trumpet of his two
immense hands, he once more hailed the returning
pilot.
“I can't bear to see you take it so much to heart,
sir,” said the kind sailor, “and I'll do for you what I
wouldn't do for another man on the face o' the 'arth.
All hands there!”
The men came aft, and the captain in brief words
stated the case to them, and appealed to their sense
of kindness for a fellow-countryman, to undertake a
task, which, in the sea then running, and with their
exhausted strength, was not a service he could well
demand in other terms. It was to get out the long-boat,
and wait off while the pilot towed me ashore and
returned with her.
“Ay, ay! sir,” was the immediate response from
every lip, and from the chief mate to the black cabinboy,
every man sprang cheerily to the lashings. It
was no momentary task, for the boat was as firmly set
in her place as the mainmast, and stowed compactly
with barrels of pork, extra rigging, and spars—in short,
all the furniture and provision of the voyage. In the
course of an hour, however, the tackle was rigged on
the fore and main yards, and with a desperate effort
its immense bulk was heaved over the side, and lay
tossing on the tempestuous waters. I shook hands
with the men, who refused every remuneration beyond
my thanks, and, following the captain over the
side, was soon toiling heavily on the surging waters,
thanking Heaven for the generous sympathies of home
and country implanted in the human bosom. Those
who know the reluctance with which a merchant captain
lays-to, even to pick up a man overboard in a fair
wind, and those who understand the meaning of a forfeited
insurance, will appreciate this instance of difficult
generosity. I shook the hard fist of the kind-hearted
skipper on the quarantine stairs, and watched
his heavy boat as she crept out of the little harbor
with the tears in my eyes. I shall travel far before I
find again a man I honor more heartily.
