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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