The author has enlarged upon this, in the faint hope of drawing attention to these matters. He would suggest that some sort of superintendence would not be altogether superfluous, and that it is not entirely right that the lives of two or three hundred men on the deep sea should be entrusted to a skipper not competent to navigate a river, nor be committed to a vessel so parsimoniously found as to be unable to encounter casualties which might happen any day in a voyage to Ramsgate.
On a subject so important as this, the author thinks it his duty to state that these incidents, extraordinary as they may appear, are in no way fictitious; that they did happen under his own eye; and that the mate, the only real sailor on board, did request of him, after the escape, a certificate that he, at least, had done his duty. If that man should be still alive, he possesses a most unique document, a certificate of seamanship, signed by a clergyman of the United Church of England and Ireland.
The skipper’s name the author does not think it necessary to record. He is not likely to be employed again; for he is one of those who have since immortalised themselves in the public prints, by losing his vessel—a circumstance which, it will readily be believed, did not excite any very great feelings of surprise in the mind of the author.
CHAPTER I.
PREPARATIONS.
“In every corner
Carefully look thou
Ere forth thou goest.”
Hávamál.
There is no saying more true than that “he who would make a tour abroad, must first make the tour of London.” There are miscellaneous articles of appropriate clothing to be got together; there are bags, knapsacks, portmanteaus, to be fitted. Above all, there are passports to be procured; than which no plague more vexatious, more annoying, or more utterly useless for any practicable or comprehensible purpose, has been devised by modern ingenuity.