The Chevalier's daughter

by Lucy Ellen Guernsey

We had a stormy voyage from the first, though the winds were for the most part favorable, and the passage promised to be short. But it was wretchedly uncomfortable. The ship was ill-found and hardly seaworthy. She was crammed with goods, which were thrust even into our cabin, thus abridging the small room allotted to us. The water was bad, and the sailors stole our wine; our provisions were not fit for well people, not to say invalids, and short as our passage was, we had more than one case of scurvy. Poor Desirée succumbed under her hardships and died when we had been out about three weeks. I had become greatly attached to her, but I could not weep for her death. It seemed a merciful deliverance.

For myself, I was not as unhappy as I should have been if I had not been so busy. The only really well person of the party, I had enough to do in waiting on the sick. I had made friends with the cook, a great good-natured blackamoor, by speaking to him in English, when I found that he understood that language, and I cooked our miserable provisions so as to make them as savory as possible, and now and then secured a bit of something better than usual to tempt the appetite of poor Sister Margaret, who seemed likely enough to die of exhaustion.

Going about as I did, I was often free to take out my little book and study its contents. The more I did so, the more I recalled what I had learned of the other Scriptures, the more I wondered how I could ever have so far departed from the simplicity of the Gospel as to profess the Roman Catholic religion. I never should have done so but for the fact that my belief in all religion had been weakened by intercourse with unbelievers, and my heart corrupted by love of pleasure and of the world. I do not say by any means that this is true of all perverts, but I know it was true of me.

But now arose a grave question, which indeed had troubled me before. I felt that I must confess my faith before men; I could not go on serving God according to the faith of my fathers and worshipping the saints at the same time. I could not believe in and apply to the One Mediator, amid at the same time invoke a hundred others. It may be easy for any one who reads these lines, and who has never been in any danger, to say what my conduct should have been. But for me, in the midst of the conflict, it was not so easy. I well knew what would be my fate, for the Jesuits ruled in Canada, and that with a rod of iron, and I had seen enough of Mother Mary to guess well that she would have no compassion for a heretic.

I thought and prayed and wept, and at last strength seemed to come to me. I had nothing to do just now but to wait on my companions. When the time came for help, I should have help. Sufficient unto the day was the evil thereof.

Help did come, and, as so often happens, through trouble. We had been out five weeks when we were overtaken by a tempest, compared to which all we had suffered before was as a summer breeze. I do not know enough of nautical matters to describe it. I know that for many days neither sun nor stars appeared; that we were tossed up to the skies and then hurled down to the abyss; that we lost sail and masts and were more than once in imminent danger of sinking; and that when the storm subsided at last we drifted in helpless wreck, having lost all our boats, and having our ship so injured that the least increase in the storm might send her to the bottom.

The captain, who had behaved like a hero, was busy in overseeing the construction of rafts. He had ordered us all on deck, sick and well together, in order to give us a last chance, though a slender one. We sat huddled together, some praying, some crying, others too miserable to do either—silent, in hopeless despair. Such was our condition when, happening to look up, I was the very first to descry a sail, and almost at the same moment the shout was raised by half a dozen at once. It was a British ship, and a large one. She was rapidly coming up with us, and our despair was changed into the certainty of succor.

It was a work of some danger to transfer so many helpless women from one ship to the other, but it was accomplished at last, the captain and Mother Mary being the last to leave the poor wreck. Nobody but myself understood English, and I was called upon to interpret. The ship was the Good Hope, trading from Bristol to New England, and now on her way to the town of Boston, from which, according to the reckoning of Captain Mayhew, we were but a short day's sail.

Mother Mary was quite in despair. She offered large rewards to the captain to alter his course and sail for the St. Lawrence, but in vain. The captain said his ship had been damaged, and was in no state for such a voyage; that he was overdue at Boston, and that his wife would be anxious about him. He would engage that Mother Mary and her companions should meet with every civility and accommodation, but to the St. Lawrence, he could not and would not go—"and that was all about it."

There was no opportunity to argue the matter further, for poor Mother Mary was taken very ill once more and had to be carried to the cabin which the sailors had hastily arranged for us. The captain apologized for its narrowness, saying that he had another small cabin which should be ours so soon as its occupant, a gentleman passenger who had been hurt in the storm, should give it up, adding, however, that he hoped to set us all on dry ground before that time to-morrow.