In the first place, he was sick! When I was young no one ever thought of being sick except women and old men; but, I suppose, now the case is different. But see the folly of the thing! For why? I've known him, as I said, any time these twenty years, and, to my certain knowledge, he was never sick in his life; and then, to go and be sick just then, at the most critical and important crisis, as it were, when so much was at stake, his whole future prosperity, as one may say, hanging on it, that is, on his being sick or well—to be sick at such a time, I say, argues the most deplorable folly and shortsightedness. Why in the world wasn't he sick during the voyage, when he had nothing else to do? or why not wait till he got home, when he could have things comfortable about him?
But the Burke rocker? surely that was a most grievous misfortune. Not if he had known how to use it. For they employ the Burke rocker to this very day in the enlightened States of Virginia and North Carolina; and, of course, it is good enough for such a semi-barbarous country as California. But, for my part, I wonder at his ever thinking of anything so plainly unfit for the purpose.
Then there is the loss he sustained by the submarine armour. All I can say is, served him right. I never saw one of those machines myself, and know nothing at all about it, but I should as soon think of ploughing with a balloon, as of digging under water, or out of water, with a feather bed on my back, a bolster on each leg, a pillow on each arm, and a great copper kettle on my head.
The project, then, of going to California was conceived with rashness—determined upon with obstinacy—and executed with folly. He, to be sure, sets up in defence the fact that the scheme was finally successful, as if that were enough to silence all objections. Now, I am an old man, and may perhaps be growing a little crotchety and whimsical in my old age, but I must and will protest against any such dangerous and heretical doctrine. Success has here nothing to do with the matter; in fact he had no business to succeed; his success was and must be a positive insult to all who are in the habit of governing their conduct by judgment and right reason. If this plea is to be received in vindication, there is no crime or blunder that may not be excused in the same way; we have no longer any use for our boasted reason, and are at once plunged from the firm ground of induction and analogy into the quagmire of chance and conjecture. He was always a sort of wildfire, and knew no more about logic than Will-o'-the-Wisp does of straight walking. But as even a Will-o'-the-Wisp is sometimes very useful, in pointing out to the benighted traveller the marshy and dangerous ground over which it hovers, so the reader may, perhaps, in like manner, take warning from the example here set before him; and if so, the author, like a piece of rotten wood,—I cannot stop to perfect the simile,—will have shed more light from his folly, than he ever could have produced by his wisdom.
[Golden dreams and leaden realities]
[CHAPTER I.]
Early in 1849, the unwilling ship in which I had taken passage for California, was dragged away from the wharf in the sooty hug of a remorseless steamtug, like a struggling, kicking schoolboy in the arms of a hated master. Such an event was not then so common as it has since become, and an immense crowd had assembled to witness our departure, with some such feelings as if we had been bound on a voyage of discovery to the moon, or, at the very least, in search of the Northwest Passage.