The next three years of my life at sea were but a repetition of the first three months of my experience, with a slight change in the scene of the incidents and a natural increase in my knowledge of seamanship. For when I returned to Boston in the Bombay from Liverpool, at the end of my first year of probation, and the opportunity was again presented to me of going into the navy as midshipman, I declined the offer of my own free will.
My views had changed during the past year, for I had learned how slow promotion was in the naval service, and I had seen in our squadron in Brazil gray-haired lieutenants who were vainly hoping for one more step before going on the retired list. In fact, Farragut, who entered the navy as a midshipman in 1810, had passed through the War of 1812, and after thirty-one years’ service was still a lieutenant in 1841.
During my year at sea my dear mother had died, my home was broken up, and when my cousin, who owned the Bombay, promised me that I should have the command of one of his ships when I was twenty-one, if I proved myself competent, I decided to stay where I was.
I received my first promotion to the position of second mate, when I was barely seventeen years of age, and a very proud youngster I was when I heard myself called “Mr.” Kelson, for the first time on the quarter-deck of the old Bombay, where less than four years before I had made my appearance as a green boy.
We were lying at this time at the levee in New Orleans, not far from Bienville Street, and abreast of the old French Market. The Bombay was the inner vessel of three in the tier, and formed a portion of the tow just made up by the tugboat Crescent City, and we were only waiting for our crew, soon to be brought on board by the boarding-house runners and the shipping-master.
There was a fine old custom that prevailed in New Orleans in those days of bringing the crew on board at night, at the last moment, comfortably drunk, counting them as received, and bundling them into their berths in the forecastle, to sleep off the fumes of their debauch. And by the next morning, when the ship would be down the river at the Belize, the tugboat was cast off, and then, and not until then, would the ship’s crew be needed to make sail and clear up the decks for sea.
It was the duty of the junior officer to receive and count the men as they came on board ship in every stage of intoxication. Some were brought over the gangway, absolutely helpless, by two stalwart runners; and when the ship’s quota had been duly delivered in the forecastle the shipping and boarding-house masters received a month’s advance pay for each man.
Whatever else might be said against this system, it certainly had the merit of simplicity; for as the voyage to Liverpool rarely exceeded thirty or thirty-five days, it was quite customary for the men to “jump the ship” in Liverpool as soon as she was docked, and, having little or no wages due them, they were cared for by another set of boarding-house sharks, who kept them during a very brief carouse in the “Sailor’s Paradise,” as Liverpool was then called, and then quietly bundled them on board of another ship, bagging their advance pay, after the fashion of their New Orleans brothers in iniquity.
All this, however, is but the prelude to my little story. That Christmas eve in 1845 I, as second mate, stood at the starboard gangway of the old Bombay, crammed to her upper deck beams with cotton, and with a deck load beside, and had checked off thirteen men drunk and semi-drunk, as they came on board in squads of two and three.
“Now then, Mr. Kelson,” said the chief mate, as he came up from the cabin, “have we got these men all aboard yet?”