Make the moral mechanism of a ship like a piece of well-contrived machinery, and but few blows will be required to keep it in order. But this requires energy in the details. It is much easier to flog a man who has committed an error, than it is to train him to avoid that error. Indolence flies to the lash, enlightened activity to a system of correct training, which is to be pressed at all points. And this training must be consistent with itself. It will not succeed if it is to be broken in upon constantly by brute force, or by language as disreputable to the officer who uses it, as it is unjust and provoking to the men to whom it is addressed. Profane or opprobrious epithets are a mockery of all discipline, except that which is enforced by the lash. An officer incapable of enforcing any other discipline, is a calamity to the service.
Thursday, Nov. 20. We discovered, this morning, a brig on our weather-beam, standing down for us, and hove-to with our main topsail to the mast. She run up Danish colors, and in an hour hove-to at a cable’s length under our lee-quarter. We lowered a boat and boarded her. She proved to be the brig Mariah, forty days from Rio Grande, bound to Hamburg. We inquired for fruit, but she had none. The captain wished to correct his reckoning, and well he might, for he was seven degrees out of his longitude.
Mr. Beale, our second master, took passage in her for the United States. It was arranged between him and the captain of the brig, that he should be put on board the first vessel that they might fall in with bound to an American port, and if they fell in with none before that, he should be landed at Dover, England. The captain must have had a very flexible policy. When it was understood that letters could be sent back, pens that had slumbered for weeks woke up. In half an hour the commodore had finished his communications, our home-letters were written, and Mr. Beale was passing over the side. In reaching the boat, a box of segars and a revolving-pistol fell overboard. Strange as it may seem, the pistol floated a moment, and was saved, while the segars were lost. I watched the letter-bag, saw that safe in, thought of the satisfaction it would give, and forgot the Havanas. Though the sea was running high, Mr. Beale reached the brig safely, and our boat returned. The little vessel then squared away, and we made sail; and thus we parted, the one for Hamburg, the other for Rio. How the paths of life cross each other!
Friday, Nov. 21. Poor Spillier, whose critical condition I have watched for several days in the sick-bay, has passed beyond hope. His disease has passed into pneumonia, and his lungs have already ceased, in a great measure, to perform their functions. I told him to-day he could not live. The sad intelligence brought tears to his eyes. He said it was dreadful to die away from his friends, and be buried in the sea. I told him his mother died a good Christian and had gone to heaven, and he could go there and meet her. But he must bring all the errors and sins of his life, and with sincere sorrow and contrition, lay them at the foot of the cross, and implore divine forgiveness. He was silent for a few minutes, and then uttered a brief and appropriate prayer, confessing his manifold transgressions, and casting himself on the compassion of Christ.
He was silent again, and seemed absorbed in thought. The expressions of mental anguish and hope alternated over his pale features like cloud and sun-light over a landscape. He now became composed, and opening his large swimming eyes upon me, thanked me for my attentions to him, and requested me to write his sisters; to give them his dying love; to say that he died in Christ and hoped to go to heaven, where he should see their mother. He told me that the dread of being buried at sea had left him; that it was no matter where his poor body was laid, if his soul was saved; that his blessed mother would know him and would be the first to greet him. How the ties of a mother’s love fasten upon her child, soothing the couch of pain and triumphing over the terrors of the grave!
Saturday, Nov. 22. We have a stiff wind to-day from the southeast, and we are running, close hauled, under reefed topsails. The sea is high, and every now and then a huge wave throws its curling crest through some half-closed port, as a wolf pounces into a sheep-fold, or as the arch adversary o’erleaped the green wall of Eden. Though we are any thing but Eden, with its beauty and its bliss: our first parent would have had but little cause of regret, if, in resigning Eden, he had relinquished only the habitudes of a sea-life. A wigwam might have consoled him for his loss. No Milton had sung—
“Of man’s first disobedience, and the fruit
Of that forbidden tree, whose mortal taste
Brought death into the world, and all our woe,
With loss of Eden.”