I Thought Of Our Situation, Living Under A
Tyranny; Of The Character Of The Country We Were In; Of The
Length
of the voyage, and of the uncertainty attending our return to
America; and then, if we should return, of
The prospect of obtaining
justice and satisfaction for these poor men; and vowed that if God
should ever give me the means, I would do something to redress the
grievances and relieve the sufferings of that poor class of beings,
of whom I then was one.
The next day was Sunday. We worked as usual, washing decks, etc.,
until breakfast-time. After breakfast, we pulled the captain
ashore, and finding some hides there which had been brought down
the night before, he ordered me to stay ashore and watch them,
saying that the boat would come again before night. They left me,
and I spent a quiet day on the hill, eating dinner with the three
men at the little house. Unfortunately, they had no books, and
after talking with them and walking about, I began to grow tired
of doing nothing. The little brig, the home of so much hardship
and suffering, lay in the offing, almost as far as one could see;
and the only other thing which broke the surface of the great bay
was a small, desolate-looking island, steep and conical, of a clayey
soil, and without the sign of vegetable life upon it; yet which had
a peculiar and melancholy interest to me, for on the top of it were
buried the remains of an Englishman, the commander of a small merchant
brig, who died while lying in this port. It was always a solemn and
interesting spot to me. There it stood, desolate, and in the midst
of desolation; and there were the remains of one who died and was
buried alone and friendless. Had it been a common burying-place,
it would have been nothing. The single body corresponded well with
the solitary character of everything around. It was the only thing
in California from which I could ever extract anything like poetry.
Then, too, the man died far from home; without a friend near him;
by poison, it was suspected, and no one to inquire into it; and
without proper funeral rites; the mate, (as I was told,) glad to
have him out of the way, hurrying him up the hill and into the ground,
without a word or a prayer.
I looked anxiously for a boat, during the latter part of the
afternoon, but none came; until toward sundown, when I saw a
speck on the water, and as it drew near, I found it was the
gig, with the captain. The hides, then, were not to go off.
The captain came up the hill, with a man, bringing my monkey
jacket and a blanket. He looked pretty black, but inquired
whether I had enough to eat; told me to make a house out of
the hides, and keep myself warm, as I should have to sleep
there among them, and to keep good watch over them. I got
a moment to speak to the man who brought my jacket.
"How do things go aboard?" said I.
"Bad enough," said he; "hard work and not a kind word spoken."
"What," said I, "have you been at work all day?"
"Yes! no more Sunday for us. Everything has been moved in the
hold, from stem to stern, and from the waterways to the keelson."
I went up to the house to supper. We had frijoles, (the perpetual
food of the Californians, but which, when well cooked, are the best
bean in the world,) coffee made of burnt wheat, and hard bread.
After our meal, the three men sat down by the light of a tallow
candle, with a pack of greasy Spanish cards, to the favorite game
of "treinta uno," a sort of Spanish "everlasting." I left them and
went out to take up my bivouack among the hides. It was now dark;
the vessel was hidden from sight, and except the three men in the
house, there was not a living soul within a league. The coati
(a wild animal of a nature and appearance between that of the fox
and the wolf) set up their sharp, quick bark, and two owls, at the
end of two distant points running out into the bay, on different
sides of the hills where I lay, kept up their alternate, dismal notes.
I had heard the sound before at night, but did not know what it was,
until one of the men, who came down to look at my quarters, told
me it was the owl. Mellowed by the distance, and heard alone, at
night, I thought it was the most melancholy, boding sound I had
ever heard. Through nearly all the night they kept it up, answering
one another slowly, at regular intervals. This was relieved by the
noisy coati, some of which came quite near to my quarters, and
were not very pleasant neighbors. The next morning, before sunrise,
the long-boat came ashore, and the hides were taken off.
We lay at San Pedro about a week, engaged in taking off hides
and in other labors, which had now become our regular duties.
I spent one more day on the hill, watching a quantity of hides
and goods, and this time succeeded in finding a part of a volume
of Scott's Pirate, in a corner of the house; but it failed me at a
most interesting moment, and I betook myself to my acquaintances on
shore, and from them learned a good deal about the customs of the
country, the harbors, etc. This, they told me, was a worse harbor
than Santa Barbara, for south-easters; the bearing of the headland
being a point and a half more to windward, and it being so shallow
that the sea broke often as far out as where we lay at anchor.
The gale from which we slipped at Santa Barbara, had been so bad a
one here, that the whole bay, for a league out, was filled with the
foam of the breakers, and seas actually broke over the Dead Man's
island.
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