The result may be imagined. The centrifugal force overturned the sleigh in about the sixteenth part of a second; we were all spilt; Aaron was hurled into a fence-corner; Feeny was scattered along the road behind the sleigh; I, with my crutch and cane strewn all around me, was “chucked” into a snow-bank at the road-side, in an inverted position—fairly buried in the cold snow, and my lonely foot pointing up toward the clouded heavens: and in the midst of this scene of general confusion, our conveyance dashed away through the winter night, and—we had to pick ourselves up and walk home, a distance of two miles and three quarters!
“I was chucked into a snow bank and fairly buried in an inverted position, my lonely foot pointing up towards the clouded heavens.”—On the Darby Road. Page 292.
CHAPTER XL.
“A life on the ocean wave, and a home on the rolling deep.”
FOR some time I had projected, for the spring of 1867, a voyage to San Francisco, via Cape Horn. My friends advised me, if I wanted to go to California, to take a steamer and go by way of the Isthmus; but, for the novelty of the thing, I determined to take passage on a sailing-ship and double Cape Horn, South America, where the Patagonians live, who eat up all the unfortunate sailors driven on their shores. [It’s a pity Cape Horn should ever be doubled, for there is too much of it now.]
When March came, and it began to get windy and stormy, I went to New York, with the intention of taking passage on the first sailing-vessel that should clear for San Francisco.
My friends again gave me a little wholesome advice, and endeavored to dissuade me from attempting the voyage till after the stormy season, but I replied that I didn’t mind seeing a storm at sea, that, in fact, I rather desired it: so, I went.
Some of the merchants, shipowners and underwriters of New York, have occasion to remember the clipper-ship Brewster, which sailed from New York for San Francisco, on the fourteenth of March, 1867, with a fresh north-west wind and under good auspices, generally. I, John Smith, was that ship’s only passenger. She was not a passenger ship; but I was allowed to take passage on her, because I wanted to go round Cape Horn. Captain Collins, the master of the vessel, asked me whether I thought I could stand up on my crutch, when the ship should come to be tossed about on a rough sea: I replied that I didn’t know about that, but that I was quite skillful at falling down.
As before hinted, we sailed on the fourteenth of March; and as a powerful little tug towed us out of the harbor, past Forts Richmond, Lafayette and Hamilton, and I looked back and saw Trinity Church steeple fading from view, I pondered on the long voyage of four or five months before me, and wondered when, if ever, I should see New York and the Atlantic coast again.
That day, and the day following, the weather was so extremely cold, that the salt water of old Ocean, as it splashed over the bulwarks, froze into a nasty uncomfortable slush, upon the deck. On the third morning—that of Saturday, the sixteenth of March—the air was much milder, and I began to entertain the liveliest hopes that we were to be favored with pleasant weather, that I might sit by the low bulwarks of the forecastle deck, and watch the blue waves foaming and splashing as the ship plowed its way through them.