“Joanna, this day brings to my mind grateful reflections.
“This is the day that numbers thirty years of my Dear’s life. O, that I could lay in her arms to-night and recount the days that have passed away in youthful love and pleasure.”
“The seed is sown, it springs up and grows to maturity, then drops its seed and dies away, while the young shoot comes up and takes its place. And so it is with Man that is born to die.”
Now and then a sea tragedy is so related in these old log books that the heart is touched with a genuine sympathy for the victim, as if he were more than a name, as if he were a friend or a neighbor. It is almost certain that no one alive to-day has ever heard of Aaron Lufkin, able seaman, who sailed from Calcutta for the Cape of Good Hope in the year 1799. The ship’s clerk, William Cleveland of Salem, who kept a journal of the voyage, wrote of this sailor in such a way that you will be able to see him for what he was, and will perhaps wish no better epitaph for yourself:
“Aaron Lufkin, one of the most active of our seamen held out till he was scarcely able to walk, but as this appeared to be fatigue, his case was not particularly observed by the Captain nor officers. When he first complained he said he had been unwell for some days but that there were so few on duty he would stand it out. Unfortunately his zeal for his duty cost him his life, for on the 17th of April he died after lingering in torment for several days. He was often out of his head and continually on the fly when no person was attending him, and constantly talking of his father, mother and sisters, which shewed how fond he was of them. Indeed his little purchases in Calcutta for his sisters were a sufficient proof. He was the only son of a respectable tradesman in the town of Freeport (Maine) and the brother of eight or nine sisters, all of which were younger than himself, though he was but twenty years old.”
The death of an able seaman, under such peaceful circumstances as these, was a matter of no importance except to his kindred and his shipmates. It is significant of the spirit and singularly dramatic activity of those times that the loss of a whole ship’s company might be given not so much space in the chronicles of the town as the foregoing tribute to poor Aaron Lufkin. Indeed “Felt’s Annals of Salem” is fairly crowded with appalling tragedies, told in a few bald lines, of which the following are quoted as examples of condensed narration:
“News is received here that Captain Joseph Orne in the ship Essex had arrived at Mocha, with $60,000 to purchase coffee, and that Mahomet Ikle, commander of an armed ship, persuaded him to trade at Hadidido, and to take on board 30 of his Arabs to help navigate her thither while his vessel kept her company; that on the approach of night, and at a concerted signal, the Arabs attacked the crew of the Essex, and Ikle laid his ship alongside, and that the result was the slaughter of Captain Orne, and all his men, except a Dutch boy named John Hermann Poll. The Essex was plundered and burnt. The headless corpse of Capt. Orne and the mutilated remains of a merchant floated on shore and were decently buried. It was soon after ascertained that the faithless Mahomet was a notorious pirate of that country. He kept the lad whose life he had spared, as a slave until 1812, when Death kindly freed him from his cruel bondage.”
On the 13th of November, 1807, “the ship Marquis de Somereulas[27] arrives hither from Cronstadt and Elsinore. She brings in eleven men, a woman called Joanna Evans, and her child, which were picked up Oct. 28th in a long-boat. The rest being eight in number, were rescued at the same time on board a ship from Philadelphia. They had been in the boat six days, during which seven of their company died of starvation. The living, in order to sustain themselves, fed upon the dead. They were the remains of one hundred and ten souls on board an English transport which was waterlogged and then blew up and foundered. The captain and some of his men, being in a small boat, by some means or other separated from those in the long boat and were never afterwards heard of. After the sad story of these shipwrecked sufferers was generally known among our citizens, they experienced from them the most kindly sympathy and substantial aid to the amount of between two and three hundred dollars.”