This Is A Good Arrangement, And Does Much Toward
Creating The Preference Sailors Usually Show For Religious Vessels.
We Were
Well satisfied if we got Sunday to ourselves, for, if any
hides came down on that day, as was often
The case when they were
brought from a distance, we were obliged to bring them off, which
usually took half a day; and as we now lived on fresh beef, and ate
one bullock a week, the animal was almost always brought down on
Sunday, and we had to go ashore, kill it, dress it, and bring it
aboard, which was another interruption. Then, too, our common
day's work was protracted and made more fatiguing by hides coming
down late in the afternoon, which sometimes kept us at work in
the surf by star-light, with the prospect of pulling on board,
and stowing them all away, before supper.
But all these little vexations and labors would have been nothing,
- they would have been passed by as the common evils of a sea-life,
which every sailor, who is a man, will go through without complaint,
- were it not for the uncertainty, or worse than uncertainty,
which hung over the nature and length of our voyage. Here we were,
in a little vessel, with a small crew, on a half-civilized coast,
at the ends of the earth, and with a prospect of remaining an
indefinite period, two or three years at the least. When we left
Boston we supposed that it was to be a voyage of eighteen months,
or two years, at most; but upon arriving on the coast, we learned
something more of the trade, and found that in the scarcity of
hides, which was yearly greater and greater, it would take us a
year, at least, to collect our own cargo, beside the passage out
and home; and that we were also to collect a cargo for a large ship
belonging to the same firm, which was soon to come on the coast,
and to which we were to act as tender. We had heard rumors of
such a ship to follow us, which had leaked out from the captain
and mate, but we passed them by as mere "yarns," till our arrival,
when they were confirmed by the letters which we brought from
the owners to their agent. The ship California, belonging to the
same firm, had been nearly two years on the coast; had collected
a full cargo, and was now at San Diego, from which port she was
expected to sail in a few weeks for Boston; and we were to collect
all the hides we could, and deposit them at San Diego, when the new
ship, which would carry forty thousand, was to be filled and sent
home; and then we were to begin anew, and collect our own cargo.
Here was a gloomy prospect before us, indeed. The California had
been twenty months on the coast, and the Lagoda, a smaller ship,
carrying only thirty-one or thirty-two thousand, had been two years
getting her cargo; and we were to collect a cargo of forty thousand
beside our own, which would be twelve or fifteen thousand; and hides
were said to be growing scarcer.
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