Two Years Before the Mast

by Richard Henry Dana

In the preceding chapter, my father contrasted the solitary bay of San Francisco in 1835, its one, or at most, two vessels and one board hut on shore, with the city of San Francisco in 1859 of nearly one hundred thousand inhabitants and a fleet of large clipper ships and sail of all kind in the harbor, which he saw on his arrival in the steamer Golden Gate bringing the ``fortnightly'' ``mails and passengers from the Atlantic world.'' The contrast from 1859 to 1911 is hardly less striking. San Francisco has now grown to over four hundred thousand inhabitants, has twelve daily trains bringing mails and passengers from across the continent and beyond, and steamers six to ten times the size of the Golden Gate. In visiting San Pedro in 1859 he speaks of the landing at the head of a creek where boats discharged and took off cargoes from a mole or wharf, and of how ``a tug ran to take off passengers from the steamer to the wharf, for the trade of Los Angeles is sufficient to support such a vessel.'' From this landing, a stage-coach went daily to Los Angeles, a town of about twenty thousand inhabitants. Now there is a fine harbor at which large steamers themselves can land at San Pedro and a four-track electric road leading to Los Angeles, now a city of three hundred thousand inhabitants. Trains on this road go at the rate of sixty miles an hour. The picturesqueness, the Aladdin lamp character of the change, would not perhaps be heightened, but certainly the contrast is greater, if the days of 1835 be compared with 1911 instead of 1859, while the startling growth from 1859 to the present makes one pause to ask what will be the progress and the changes in the next fifty-two years.

Of the fate of the vessels since my father wrote ``Twenty-four Years After,'' little has come to our knowledge. Of the brig Pilgrim, he says, ``I read of her total loss at sea by fire off the coast of North Carolina.'' On the records of the United States Custom House at Boston is this epitaph, ``Brig Pilgrim, owner, R. Haley, surrender of transfer 30 June 1856, broken up at Key West.'' Is it not romantic and appropriate that this vessel, so associated with the then Mexican-Spanish coast of California, should have left her bones on the coast of the once Spanish colony of Florida?

A schoolmate of mine dwelling at Yokohama tells us of the fate of the ship Lagoda. This is the vessel that Captain Thompson of the Pilgrim came aboard and ``brought his brig with him'' (page 137), and to which poor Foster fled (page 154), in fear of being flogged. The Lagoda was under three hundred and forty tons, built at Scituate, Mass., in 1826, of oak with ``bluff bows and square stern.'' Later she was sold to a New Bedford owner, converted into a bark and turned into a whaler. In 1890, she came to Yokohama much damaged, was officially surveyed and pronounced not worth repair, was sold at auction and bought as a coal hulk for the Canadian Pacific Company's steamers at that port, and in 1899 was sold to the Japanese, burned and broken up at Kanagawa. The fate of these vessels, with that of the Alert burned at sea by the Alabama, illustrates how vessels, as Ernest Thompson Seton says of wild animals, seldom fail to have a hard, if not a tragic, ending.

It may be interesting to state that the Ayacucho (pronounced I-ah-coo-tsho) was named after the battle fought December 9, 1824, in Peru, South America, in which the Spaniards were defeated by the armies of Columbia and Peru, which battle ended the Spanish rule in America. What became of her after she was sold to the Chilian government as a vessel of war, we do not know.

The Loriotte, we learn, was built at Plymouth, Mass., in 1828, was ninety-two tons, originally a schooner and later changed into an hermaphrodite brig. Gorham H. Nye, her captain and part owner, was born in Nantucket, Mass.

As to persons, there is little to add about Captain Thompson. Captain Faucon gave it as his opinion that Thompson was not a good navigator and that Thompson knew his sailors knew it, and to this cause he attributed in some measure Thompson's hard treatment of the men. His navigation of the Alert some twelve or fifteen hundred miles westward of the usual course around Cape Horn on the return passage was an instance. It was much criticised by his sailors and officers. It not only greatly lengthened the total distance but brought the vessel into currents that were more antarctic and more frequented with ice than those currents nearer the southwest coast of South America, usually taken advantage of on the trip west to east. In 1880, on my visit to the scenes of ``Two Years Before the Mast,'' I met a nephew of Captain Thompson at Santa Barbara. He was then the proprietor of the hotel at which I stayed. He invited me to walk with him Sunday afternoon. When we started out together I noticed he had a large, thick cane, while I had none. Could it be he was to wreak vengeance on the son of the man who had exposed his uncle? I was strong and athletic after a year as stroke of the Freshman crew and three years as stroke of the University crew at Harvard. I kept my weather eye open and took care to be a little behind rather than ahead of my companion. At last he began on my father's story, ``Two Years Before the Mast,'' and his uncle. Now it is coming, thought I, but to my surprise and relief he detailed a family trouble in which the uncle had tried to get into his own possession land which belonged in part to his brothers and of which he, the captain, had been placed in charge, and my friend, for so I could then think of him, wound up with saying my father had done his uncle perfect justice. The year of Captain Thompson's death was 1837.

The chief mate of the Pilgrim on her outward voyage, Mr. Andrew B. Amerzeen, was born at Epsom, N.H., June 7, 1806. After returning in the Alert in 1836, as described by my father, his mother prevailed on him to give up long voyages, owing to the fact that his father, a ship owner and master, had been lost at sea with his ship a year or two before. Mr. Amerzeen then made several short voyages to the West Indies and in the fall of 1838 his ship was dismasted in a storm somewhere below Cape Hatteras. He was ill with yellow fever and confined to his stateroom at the time. The ship was worked into one of the southern ports, Savannah I am told, and there Mr. Amerzeen died September 27, 1838, from this fever.

``Jim Hall,'' the sailor who was made second mate of the Pilgrim in Foster's place, after several years' successful career as Captain and Manager of the Pacific Steamship Navigation Company on the west coast of South America with the title of Commodore, returned to this country, having saved a competence, and settled at East Braintree, Massachusetts. He called on me at my office some ten years after my father's death. He was six feet tall, a handsome man of striking appearance, with blue eyes, nearly white hair, a ruddy countenance, and a very straight figure for one of nearly eighty years of age. He was born at Pittston, Maine, July 4, 1813. He is said to have commanded twenty-seven different vessels, steam and sail, and never to have had an accident, ``never cost the underwriters a dollar.'' He died April 22, 1904. His wife (Mary Ann Kimball of Hookset, N.H.) survived him.

Of George P. Marsh, the new hand shipped at San Pedro October 22, 1835, the Englishman with a strange career, we have heard in a letter from Mr. Samuel C. Clarke of Chicago, passenger with Captain Low on the ship Cabot when she took Marsh from the Pelew Islands. Mr. Clarke kept a journal at the time, which confirms in almost every detail the story as told by Marsh, with one or two very minor exceptions but one important difference. He told them when first rescued that he was ``a native of Providence, Rhode Island'' in America, while to his shipmates in California he always said he was a native of England and brought up on a smuggler. By a letter from his nephew, Edward W. Boyd, we learn that his real name was George Walker Marsh, that he was the eldest son of a retired English army officer and his wife, and was born in St. Malo, France, hence his knowledge of the French language. He went to sea against their will but communicated with them several times afterwards. After he left to join the Ayacucho in Chili, all trace of him was lost at Valparaiso.

Captain Edward Horatio Faucon, who took out the Alert and brought back the Pilgrim, continued, after my father's last chapter, to live at Milton Hill where he still kept ``the sea under his eye from the piazza of his house.'' He was occasionally employed by Boston marine underwriters on salvage cases, going to many places, from St. Thomas, W.I., and the Bermudas, to Nova Scotia in the north. He was a constant reader, chiefly interested in history, political economy and sociology. He made visits, annually or oftener, on my mother until his death on May 22, 1894. We all remember his keen eye, erect figure, quiet reserve, and old-time courtesy of manner, and his personal interest in those who come and go in ships, and more particularly in those of the Alert, his favorite ship. He was born in Boston, November 21, 1806. His father, Nicolas Michael Faucon, was a Frenchman of Rouen, who fought in the Napoleonic wars with distinction as Captain of the Second Regiment of the Hussars, and came to this country, where he married Miss Catherine Waters at Trinity Church, Boston. He was instructor in French at Harvard, 1806-1816. Our Captain Faucon left a widow and daughter, and a promising son, Gorham Palfrey Faucon, a Harvard graduate, a well-trained civil engineer in the employ of large railroads, and, like his father, interested in literature and public problems. He died in 1897, in the early prime of life.