Captain Cleveland manned a boat with his armed sailors, pulled for the beach and promptly took his men away from their captors. As soon as the crew was on board, the Commandant’s guard was unceremoniously disarmed, and with a fair wind the Lelia Byrd moved out to sea. “Before we got within gunshot of the fort,” wrote Captain Cleveland in his journal, “they fired a shot ahead of us. We had previously loaded all our guns, and brought them all on the starboard side. As the tide was running in strong, we were not abreast the fort—which we passed within musket shot—till half an hour after receiving the first shot, all of which time they were playing away upon us; but as soon as we were abreast the fort we opened upon them, and in ten minutes silenced their battery and drove everybody out of it. They fired only two guns after we began, and only six of their shot counted, one of which went through between wind and water; the others cut the rigging and sails. As soon as we were clear we landed the guard, who had been in great tribulation lest we should carry them off.”
Thirty years later Richard Henry Dana, author of Two Years Before the Mast, found the story of this exploit still current in San Diego and the neighboring ports and missions. Shortly after the transfer of California to the United States, Commodore Biddle referred to the “Battle of San Diego” as giving Captain Cleveland a fair claim to the governorship of the territory which claim he had won in the Lelia Byrd long before Fremont’s invasion.[42]
After some further adventures in search of trade along the Mexican coast the adventurers laid their course for the Sandwich Islands. They had purchased a horse on the coast and landed the beast on the island of Owyhee. There were only two European inhabitants on the Sandwich Islands at that time, John Young and Isaac Davis. Young came on board the brig and wanted to buy the mare as a present for King Tamaahmaah, but when his blasé Majesty saw the animal cantering up and down the beach he expressed little curiosity or interest, although this was the first animal larger than a pig ever seen by the natives of the Sandwich Islands. The king’s subjects were wildly excited, however, and when one of the sailors mounted the mare and tore up and down the beach, the spectators were much concerned for the rider’s safety, “and rent the air with shouts of admiration.”
From the Sandwich Islands the Lelia Byrd was carried to China, arriving off Canton on the 29th of August, 1803. Here the cargo of sea-otter skins was sold, and the two captains, Shaler and Cleveland, parted company for the time. Shaler loaded the brig for a return voyage to the California coast and Richard Cleveland took passage around the Cape of Good Hope, homeward for Boston.
At the age of thirty years this Salem mariner returned to his kinfolk and friends after an absence of seven and a half years at sea. He had left home a lad of twenty-three with two thousand dollars as his total capital. He had been twice around the world, had accomplished three most extraordinary voyages in tiny craft, from Europe to the Cape of Good Hope, from India to the Isle of France and from China to the Northwest coast of America. He had fought and beaten mutineers and Spanish gunners by force of arms, his invincible pluck and tenacity had won him victories over Governors and Viceroys from Africa to the Mexican coast, he had succeeded in a dozen hazardous undertakings where a hundred men had failed, and at thirty years of age he had lived a score of ordinary lives. He had increased his slender capital to seventy thousand dollars by the cleanest and most admirable exertions, and as fortunes were counted a hundred years ago, he was a rich man.
The achievements of modern so-called “Captains of Industry,” who amass millions in wresting, by methods of legalized piracy, the riches that other men have earned, raise a prodigious clamor of comment, admiring and otherwise. But, somehow, such an American as Richard Cleveland seems to be a far more worthy type for admiration, and his deeds loom in pleasing contrast with those of a railroad wrecker or stock juggler, even though a fortune of seventy thousand dollars is a bagatelle in the eyes of the twentieth century.
Captain Cleveland believed that his affairs were so prosperously shaped that he could retire from the sea. He built him a home in Lancaster, Mass., where with his wife and brother, his well-stored mind and simple tastes enjoyed the tranquil life of a New England village. But much of his fortune was afloat or invested in foreign shipping markets, and misfortune overtook his ventures one after the other. Three years after his homecoming he was obliged to go to sea again to win a new treasure in partnership with his old friend, Nathaniel Shaler. For almost fifteen years longer he voyaged from one quarter of the globe to the other, winning large profits only to risk them in more alluring undertakings, always turning a resolute and undaunted front to whatever odds overtook him. In his elder years, after a series of cruel maritime reverses, he wrote as a summary:
“On making an estimate of my losses for the twenty years between 1800 and 1820, I find their aggregate amount to exceed $200,000, though I never possessed at any one time a sum to exceed $80,000. Under such losses I have been supported by the consoling reflection that they had been exclusively my own, and that it is not in the power of any individual to say, with truth, that I have ever injured him to the amount of a dollar. With a small annual sum from the Neapolitan indemnity I have been able to support myself till this was on the point of ceasing by the cancelling of that debt, when I was so fortunate as to obtain an office in the Boston Custom House, the duties of which I hope to perform faithfully and in peace during the few remaining years or months or days which may be allotted to me on earth.”
From an obituary notice in the Boston Courier of December 8, 1860, this tribute to the memory of Richard Cleveland is quoted, because it was written by one who knew him:
“While in the planning of commercial enterprises he showed rare inventive qualities, and in the execution of them wonderful energy and perseverance, he was somewhat deficient in those humbler qualities which enable men to keep and manage what they have earned.... But this reverse of fortune served to bring out more and more the beauty of Captain Cleveland’s character, and to give him new claims to the affection and esteem of his friends. It was gently, patiently, heroically borne; never a word of complaint was heard from his lips, never a bitter arraignment of the ways of Providence, never an envious fling at the prosperity of others. And the wise, kind, cheerful old man was happy to the end.”