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.
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