He gave me an address in England where he could always be reached, and in closing his letter he added, "If you should ever be in England, either in peace or war, don't fail to find us or send to us. It may be in my power to serve you some day, and you may hold to the assurance that I shall do so whenever possible." I carefully noted his address, and not only wrote it down, but committed it to memory. "Who knows," I said to myself, "but that the fortune of war may find me in England, a prisoner; and should this ever happen, the friendship of the Grahams will be very greatly to my advantage."
Each time that I came into port I wrote to my parents and friends at home, told how I was prospering, and gave them practical evidence of my success in life by sending money sufficient to care for the entire family and place them above want, but not enough to induce the younger members of it to lead lives of idleness. What I was I had become through industry, and I had no notion of encouraging indolence in any of my brothers and sisters. There is an old saying among New England farmers that "Everybody must hoe his own row;" and out of it has grown an injunction to each one of us in the emphatic though homely phrase, "Paddle your own canoe." Perhaps none of the members of my family were inclined to live at the expense of others, but I took the precaution to keep them out of temptation to do so.
Cruise after cruise went the Marguerite from New York, and each voyage she was successful, though less so as time went on than during the first few months of the war. Altogether, I took twenty-two prizes with the schooner; three of them were re-captured by British war-ships, and one was lost in a storm on the coast of Long Island. The rest got in safely, and were sold with their cargoes. My share of the prize-money did not make me rich beyond the dreams of avarice, as Dr. Johnson says; but it was enough to make me comfortable for the rest of my life, and to share my comfort with a wife and children.
As the year 1814 opened, I began to think it was time for me to retire from the sea, and tempt Fortune no longer. She is said to be a fickle jade, and perhaps would turn from me when I least expected it.
She gave me a warning of what she might do by getting me into several predicaments from which it was little less than a miracle that the Marguerite escaped capture. Great numbers of British war-ships were hovering on our coast and swarming on the ocean; and on half a dozen and more occasions it was only the superior sailing qualities of the schooner, or some tact of my own, that saved her. Once we were surrounded by a fleet of five British war-ships; the wind had fallen almost to a calm, and capture seemed inevitable. The nearest of the enemy's vessels had got out their boats to carry us by boarding, and I was about to order our flag lowered to avoid helpless bloodshed, when suddenly I saw in the distance the waters rippled by a breeze, and a dark cloud which betokened a squall.
CHAPTER XIX.
ESCAPING FROM A BRITISH FLEET.—DESTRUCTION OF THE MARGUERITE.—CAPTURED BY AN OLD ACQUAINTANCE.—PRISONER AT PLYMOUTH AND DARTMOOR.
I thought of the escape of the Constitution under similar circumstances, and prepared accordingly. The British ships shortened sail to avoid the peril of capsizing; I kept everything spread, and when the squall struck us we heeled over so that our lee guns were buried. For a moment I thought we would go over on our beam-ends; then the Marguerite stiffened up, and darted ahead like a race-horse, and away we sped through the water. On we dashed between two of the ships that had closed in upon us, and, though the shot flew thick, we were not touched by a single one of them. Before the enemy could gather way to follow us, we were out of reach of harm, and we stayed out of it too.