Tastes differ as to which of the three night watches is preferable. Perhaps some one who has tried will reply they are all alike detestable, and, if he be Irish, will add that the only decent watch on deck is the watch below—an "all night in." But I also have tried; and while prepared to admit that perhaps the pleasantest moment of any particular watch is that in which your successor touches his cap and says, "I'll relieve you," I still maintain there are abundant and large compensations. Particularly for a midshipman, for he had no responsibilities. The lieutenant of the watch had always before him the possibilities of a mischance; and one very good officer said to me he did not believe any lieutenant in the navy felt perfectly comfortable in charge of the deck in a heavy gale. Freedom from anxiety, however, is a matter of temperament; not by any means necessarily of courage, although it adds to courage the invaluable quality of not wasting nerve force on difficulties of the imagination. A weather-brace may go unexpectedly; a topsail-sheet part; an awkward wave come on board. Very true; but what is the use of worrying, unless you are constitutionally disposed to worry. If you are constitutionally so disposed, I admit there is not much use in talking. Illustrative of this, the following story has come down of two British admirals, both men of proved merit and gallantry. "When Howe was in command of the Channel Fleet, after a dark and boisterous night, in which the ships had been in some danger of running foul of each other, Lord Gardner, then the third in command, the next day went on board the Queen Charlotte and inquired of Lord Howe how he had slept, for that he himself had not been able to get any rest from anxiety of mind. Lord Howe said he had slept perfectly well, for, as he had taken every possible precaution he could before dark, he laid himself down with a conscious feeling that everything had been done which it was in his power to do for the safety of the ships and of the lives intrusted to his care, and this conviction set his mind at ease." The apprehensiveness with which Gardner was afflicted "is further exemplified by an anecdote told by Admiral Sir James Whitshed, who commanded the Alligator, next him in the line. Such was his anxiety, even in ordinary weather, that, though each ship carried three poop lanterns, he always kept one burning in his cabin, and when he thought the Alligator was approaching too near, he used to run out into the stern gallery with the lantern in his hand, waving it so as to be noticed." My friend above quoted had only recently quitted a brig-of-war, on board which he had passed several night watches with a man standing by the lee topsail-sheet, axe in hand, to cut if she went over too far, lest she might not come back; and the circumstance had left an impression. I do not think he was much troubled in this way on board our frigate; yet the Savannah, but little smaller than the Congress, had been laid nearly on her beam-ends by a sudden squall, and had to cut, when entering Rio two years before.

Being even at nineteen of a meditative turn, fond of building castles in the air, or recalling old acquaintance and auld lang syne,—the retrospect of youth, though short, seems longer than that of age,—I preferred in ordinary weather the mid-watch, from midnight to four. There was then less doing; more time and scope to enjoy. The canvas had long before been arranged for the night. If the wind shifted, or necessity for tacking arose, of course it was done; but otherwise a considerate officer would let the men sleep, only rousing them for imperative reasons. The hum of the ship, the loitering "idlers,"—men who do not keep watch,—last well on to ten, or after, in the preceding watch; and the officers of the deck in sailing-ships had not the reserve—or preserve—which the isolation of the modern bridge affords its occupants. Although the weather side of the quarter-deck was kept clear for him and the captain, there was continued going and coming, and talking near by. He was on the edge of things, if not in the midst; while the midshipman of the forecastle had scarce a foot he could call his very own. But when the mid-watch had been mustered, the lookouts stationed, and the rest of them had settled themselves down for sleep between the guns, out of the way of passing feet, the forecastle of the Congress offered a very decent promenade, magnificent compared to that proverbial of the poops of small vessels—"two steps and overboard." Then began the steady pace to and fro, which to me was natural and inherited, easily maintained and consistent with thought—indeed, productive of it. Not every officer has this habit, but most acquire it. I have been told that, however weakly otherwise, the calf muscles of watch-officers were generally well developed. There were exceptions. A lieutenant who was something of a wag on one occasion handed the midshipman of his watch a small instrument, in which the latter did not recognize a pedometer. "Will you kindly keep this in your trousers-pocket for me till the watch is over?" At eight bells he asked for it, and, after examining, said, quizzically, "Mr. ——, I see you have walked just half a mile in the last four hours." Of course, walking is not imperative, one may watch standing; but movement tends to wakefulness—you can drowse upon your feet—while to sit down, besides being forbidden by unwritten law, is a treacherous snare to young eyelids.

How much a watch afforded to an eye that loved nature! I have been bored so often by descriptions of scenery, that I am warned to put here a sharp check on my memory, lest it run away with me, and my readers seek escape by jumping off. I will forbear, therefore, any attempt at portraiture, and merely mention the superb aurora borealis which illuminated several nights of the autumn of 1859, perceptibly affecting the brightness of the atmosphere, while we lay becalmed a little north of the tropics. But other things I shall have some excuse for telling; because what my eyes used to see then few mortal eyes will see again. Travel will not reach it; for though here and there a rare sailing-ship is kept in a navy, for occasional instruction, otherwise they have passed away forever; and the exceptions are but curiosities—reality has disappeared. They no longer have life, and are now but the specimens of the museum. The beauties of a brilliant night at sea, whether starlit or moonlit, the solemn, awe-inspiring gloom and silence of a clouded, threatening sky, as the steamer with dull thud moves at midnight over the waste of waters, these I need not describe; many there are that see them in these rambling days. These eternities of the heavens and the deep abide as before, are common to the steamer as to the sailing-ship; but what weary strain of words can restore to imagination the beautiful living creature which leaped under our feet and spread her wings above us? For a sailing-ship was more inspiring from within than from without, especially a ship of war, which, as usually ordered, permitted no slovenliness; abounded in the perpetual seemliness that enhances beauty yet takes naught from grace. Viewed from without, undeniably a ship under sail possesses attraction; but it is from within that you feel the "very pulse of the machine." No canvas looks so lofty, speaks so eloquently, as that seen from its own deck, and this chiefly has invested the sailing-vessel with its poetry. This the steamer, with its vulgar appeal to physical comfort, cannot give. Does any one know any verse of real poetry, any strong, thrilling idea, suitably voiced, concerning a steamer? I do—one—by Clough, depicting the wrench from home, the stern inspiration following the wail of him who goeth away to return no more:

"Come back! come back! Back flies the foam; the hoisted flag streams back; The long smoke wavers on the homeward track. Back fly with winds things which the winds obey, The strong ship follows its appointed way."

Oddly enough, two of the most striking sea scenes that I remember, very different in character, associate themselves with my favorite mid-watch. The first was the night on which we struck the northeast trade-winds, outward bound. We had been becalmed for nearly, if not quite, two weeks in the "horse latitudes;" which take their name, tradition asserts, from the days when the West India sugar islands depended for live-stock, and much besides, on the British continental colonies. If too long becalmed, and water gave out, the unhappy creatures had to be thrown overboard to save human lives. On the other side of the northeast trades, between them and the southeast, towards the equator, lies another zone of calms, the doldrums, from which also the Congress this time suffered. We were sixty seven or eight days from the Capes of the Delaware to Bahia, a distance, direct, of little more than four thousand miles. Of course, there was some beating against head wind, but we could not have averaged a hundred miles to the twenty-four hours. During much of this passage the allowance of fresh water was reduced to two quarts per man, except sick, for all purposes of consumption—drinking and cooking. Under such conditions, washing had to be done with salt water.

We had worried our weary way through the horse latitudes, embracing every flaw of wind, often accompanied by rain, to get a mile ahead here, half a dozen miles there; and, as these spurts come from every quarter, this involves a lot of bracing—changing the position of the yards; continuous work, very different from the placid restfulness of a "whole gale" of wind, with everything snug aloft and no chance of let-up during the watch. Between these occasional puffs would come long pauses of dead calm, in which the midshipman of the watch would enter in the log: "1 A.M., 0 knots; 2 A.M., 6 fathoms (3/4 knot); 3 A.M., 0 knots; 4 A.M., 1 knot, 2 fathoms;" the last representing usually a guess of the officer of the deck as to what would make the aggregate for the four hours nearly right. It did not matter, for we were hundreds of miles from land and the sky always clear for observations. Few of the watch got much sleep, because of the perpetual bracing; and all the while the ship rolling and sending, in the long, glassy ocean swell, unsteadied by the empty sails, which swung out with one lurch as though full, and then slapped back all together against the masts, with a swing and a jerk and a thud that made every spar tremble, and the vessel herself quiver in unison. Nor were we alone. Frequently two or three American clippers would be hull-up at the same moment within our horizon, bound the same way; and it was singular how, despite the apparently unbroken calm, we got away from one another and disappeared. Ships lying with their heads "all around the compass" flapped themselves along in the direction of their bows, the line of least resistance.

I do not know at what hour under such circumstances we had struck the trades, but when I came on deck at midnight we had got them steady and strong. As there was still a good-deal of casting to make, the ship had been brought close to the wind on the port tack; the bowlines steadied out, but not dragged, every sail a good rap full, "fast asleep," without the tremor of an eyelid, if I may so style a weather leach, or of any inch of the canvas, from the royals down to the courses. Every condition was as if arranged for a special occasion, or to recompense us for the tedium of the horse latitudes. The moon was big, and there was a clear sky, save for the narrow band of tiny clouds, massed like a flock of sheep, which ever fringes the horizon of the trades; always on the horizon, as you progress, yet never visible above when the horizon of this hour has become the zenith of the next. After the watch was mustered and the lookouts stationed, there came perfect silence, save for the slight, but not ominous, singing of the wind through the rigging, and the dash of the water against the bows, audible forward though not aft. The seamen, not romantically inclined, for the most part heeded neither moon nor sky nor canvas. The vivid, delicate tracery of the shrouds and ruining gear, the broader image of the sails, shadowed on the moonlit deck, appealed not to them. Recognizing only that we had a steady wind, no more bracing to-night, and that the most that could happen would be to furl the royals should it freshen, they hastened to stow themselves away for a full due between the cannon, out of the way of passing feet, sure that this watch on deck would be little less good than one below. Perhaps there were also visions of "beans to-morrow." I trust so.

The lieutenant of the watch, Smith, and I had it all to ourselves; unbroken, save for the half-hourly call of the lookouts: "Starboard cathead!" "Port cathead!" "Starboard gangway!" "Port gangway!" "Life buoy!" He came forward from time to time to take it all in, and to see how the light spars were standing, for the ship was heeling eight or ten degrees, and racing along, however quietly; but the strain was steady, no whipping about from uneasy movement of the vessel, and we carried on to the end. Each hour I hove the log and reported: one o'clock, eleven knots; two o'clock, eleven; three o'clock, eleven—famous going for an old sailing-ship close-hauled. Splendid! we rubbed our hands; what a record! But, alas! at four o'clock, ten! Commonly, ten used to be a kind of standard of excellence; Nelson once wrote, as expressive of an utmost of hopefulness, "If we all went ten knots, I should not think it fast enough;" but, puffed up as we had been, it was now a sad come-down. Smith looked at me. "Are you sure, Mr. Mahan?" With the old hand-log, its line running out while the sand sped its way through the fourteen-seconds glass, the log-beaver might sometimes, by judicious "feeding"—hurrying the line under the plea of not dragging the log-chip—squeeze a little more record out of the log-line than the facts warranted; and Smith seemed to feel I might have done a little better for the watch and for the ship. But in truth, when a cord is rushing through your hand at the rate of ten miles an hour—fifteen feet a second—you cannot get hold enough to hasten the pace. He passed through a struggle of conscience. "Well, I suppose I must; log her ten-four." A poor tail to our beautiful kite. Ten-four meant ten and a half; for in those primitive days knots were divided into eight fathoms. Now they are reckoned by tenths; a small triumph of the decimal system, which may also carry cheer to the constant hearts of the spelling reformers.

A year later, at like dead of night, I witnessed quite another scene. We were then off the mouth of the river La Plata, perhaps two hundred miles from shore. We had been a fortnight at sea, cruising; and I have always thought that the captain, who was interested in meteorology and knew the region, kept us out till we should catch a pampero. We caught it, and quite up to sample. I had been on deck at 9 P.M., and the scene then, save for the force of the wind, was nearly the same as that I have just described. The same sail, the same cloudless sky and large moon; but we were going only five knots, with a quiet, rippling sea, on which the moonbeams danced. Such a scene as Byron doubtless had in memory:

"The midnight moon is weaving Her bright chain o'er the deep; Whose breast is gently heaving Like an infant's asleep."

Having to turn out at twelve, I soon started below; but before swinging into my hammock I heard the order to furl the royals and send the yards on deck. This startled me, for I had not been watching the barometer, as the captain had; and I remember, by the same token, that I was then enlarging on the beauties of the outlook above, accompanied by some disparaging remarks about what steamers could show, whereupon one of our senior officers, over-hearing, called me in, and told me quite affably, and in delicate terms, not to make a fool of myself.

But "Linden saw another sight," when I returned to the deck at midnight; sharp, I am sure, for I held to the somewhat priggish saying, first devised, I imagine, by some wag tired of waiting for his successor, "A prompt relief is the pride of a young officer." The quartermaster, who called me and left the lantern dimly burning, had conveyed the comforting assurance that it looked very bad on deck, and the second reef was just taking in the topsails. When I got to my station, the former watch was still aloft, tying their last reef-points, from which they soon straggled down, morosely conscious that they had lost ten minutes of their one watch below, and would have to be on deck again at four. The moon was still up, but, as it were, only to emphasize the darkness of the huge cloud masses which scudded across the sky, with a rapid but steady gait, showing that the wind meant business. The new watch was given no more time than to wake up and shake themselves. They were soon on the yards, taking the third and fourth-last—reefs in the fore and main topsails, furling the mizzen, and seeing that the lower sails and topgallant-sails were securely rolled up against the burst that was to be expected. Before 1.30 A.M. all things were as ready as care could make them, and not too soon. The moon was sinking, or had sunk; the sky darkened steadily, though not beyond that natural to a starless night. In the southwest faint glimmerings of lightning gave warning of what might be looked for; but we had used light well while we had it, and could now bear what was to come. At 2 P.M. it came with a roar and a rush, "butt-end foremost," as the saying is, preceded by a few huge drops of scurrying rain.

"When the rain before the wind, Topsail sheets and halyards mind;"

but that was for other conditions than ours.

A pampero at its ordinary level is no joke; but this was the charge of a wild elephant, which would exhaust itself soon, but for the nonce was terrific. Pitch darkness settled down upon the ship. Except in the frequent flashes of lightning, literally blue, I could not see the forecastle boatswain's mate of the watch, who stood close by my elbow, ready pipe in hand. The rain came down in buckets, and in the midst of all the wind suddenly shifted, taking the sails flat aback. The shrillness of the boatswain's pipes is then their great merit. They pierce through the roar of the tempest, by sheer difference of pitch, an effect one sometimes hears in an opera; and the officer of the deck, our second lieutenant, who bore the name of Andrew Jackson, and was said to have received his appointment from him—which shows how far back he went—had a voice of somewhat the same quality. I had often heard it assert itself, winding in and out through the uproar of an ordinary gale, but on this occasion it went clean away—whistled down the wind. "I always think bad of it," said Boatswain Chucks, "when the elements won't allow my whistle to be heard; and I consider it hardly fair play." Such advantage the elements took of us on this occasion, but the captain came to the rescue. He had the throat of a bull of Bashan, which went the elements one better on their own hand. Under his stentorian shouts the weather head-braces were led along (probably already had been, as part of the preparation, but that was quarter-deck work, outside my knowledge) and manned. All other gear being coiled out of the way, on the pins, there was nothing to confuse or entangle; the fore topsail was swung round on the opposite tack from the main, a-box, to pay the ship's head off and leave her side to the wind, steadied by the close-reefed fore and main topsails, which would then be filled. She was now, of course, going astern fast; but this mattered nothing, for the sea had not yet got up. The evolution, common enough itself, an almost invariable accompaniment of getting under way, was now exciting even to grandeur, for we could see only when the benevolent lightning kindled in the sky a momentary glare of noonday. "Now that's a clever old man," said the boatswain's mate next day to me, approvingly, of the captain; "boxing her off that way, with all that wind and blackness, was handsomely done." After this we settled down to a two days' pampero, with a huge but regular sea.

Whether the Congress's helm on this interesting occasion was shifted for sternboard I never inquired. Marryat tells us it was a moot point in his young days. Our captain was an excellent seaman, but had 'doxies of his own. Of these, one which ran contrary to current standards was in favor of clewing up a course or topsail to leeward, in blowing weather. Among the lieutenants was a strong champion of the opposite and accepted dogma, and a messmate of mine, in his division and shining by reflected light, was always prompt to enforce closure of debate by declaiming:

"He who seeks the tempest to disarm Will never first embrail the lee yard-arm."

Whether Falconer, besides being a poet, was also an expert in seamanship, or whether he simply registered the views of his day, may be questioned. The two alternatives, I fancy, were the chance of splitting the sail, and that of springing the yard; and any one who has ever watched a big bag of wind whipping a weather yard-arm up and down in its bellying struggles, after clewing up to windward, will have experienced as eager a desire to call it down as he has ever felt to suppress its congener in an after-dinner oration. Both are much out of place and time.

Days of the past! Certainly a watch spent reefing topsails in the rain was less tedious than that everlasting bridge of to-day: Tramp! Tramp! or stand still, facing the wind blowing the teeth down your throat. Nothing to do requiring effort; the engine does all that; but still a perpetual strain of attention due to the rapid motion of vessels under steam. The very slowness of sailing-ships lightened anxiety. In such a gale you might as well be anxious in a wheel-chair. And then, when you went below, you went, not bored, but healthfully tired with active exertion of mind and body. Yes; the sound was sweet then, at eight bells, the pipe, pipe, pipe, pipe of the boatswain's mates, followed by their gruff voices drawling out, in loud sing-song: "A-a-a-all the starboard watch! Come! turn out there! Tumble out! Tumble out! Show a leg! Show a leg! On deck there! all the starboard watch!" When I went below that morning with the port watch, at four o'clock, I turned over to my relief a forecastle on which he would have nothing to do but drink his coffee at daylight.

That daylight coffee of the morning watch, chief of its charms, need not be described to the many who have experienced the difference between the old man and the new man of before and after coffee. The galley (kitchen) fire of ships of war used to be started at seven bells of the mid-watch (3.30 A.M.); and the officers, and most of the men, who next came on duty, managed to have coffee, the latter husbanding their rations to this end. Since those days a benevolent regulation has allowed an extra ration of coffee to the crew for this purpose, so that no man goes without, or works the morning watch on an empty stomach. For the morning watch was very busy. Then, on several days of the week, the seamen washed their clothes. Then the upper deck was daily scrubbed; sometimes the mere washing off the soap-suds left from the clothes, sometimes with brooms and sand, sometimes the solemn ceremony of holy-stoning with its monotonous musical sound of grinding. Along with these, dovetailed in as opportunity offered, in a sailing-ship under way there went on the work of readjusting the yards and sails; a pull here and a pull there, like a woman getting herself into shape after sitting too long in one position. Yards trimmed to a nicety; the two sheets of each sail close home alike; all the canvas taut up, from the weather-tacks of the courses to the weather-earings of the royals; no slack weather-braces, or weather-leaches, letting a bight of loose canvas sag like an incipient double chin. When these and a dozen other little details had remedied the disorders of the night, due to the invariable slacking of cordage under strain, the ship was fit for any eye to light on, like a conscious beauty going forth conquering and to conquer. I doubt the crew grumbled and d——d a little under their breath, for the process was tedious; yet it was not only a fad, but necessary, and the deck-officer who habitually neglected it might possibly rise to an emergency, but was scarcely otherwise worth his salt. In my humble judgment, he had better have worn a frock-coat unbuttoned.

Occupation in plenty was not the only solace of a morning watch; at least in the trades. While the men were washing their clothes, the midshipman of the watch, amid the exhilaration of his coffee, and with the cool sea-water careering over his bare feet, had ample leisure to watch the break of day: the gradual lighting up of the zenith, the rosy tints gathering and growing upon the tiny, pearly trade-clouds of which I have spoken, the blue of the water gradually revealing itself, laughing with white-caps, like the Psalmist's valleys of corn; until at last the sun appeared, never direct from the sea, but from these white cloud banks which extend less than five degrees above it. Such a scene presents itself day after day, day after day, monotonous but never wearisome, to a vessel running down the trades; that is, steering from east to west, with fixed, fair breeze, as I have more than once had the happiness to do. Then, as the saying was, a fortnight passed without touching brace or tack, because no change of wind; a slight exaggeration, for frequent squalls required the canvas to be handled, but substantially true in impression. Balmy weather and a steady gait, rarely more than seven or eight knots—less than two hundred miles a day; but who would be in haste to quit such conditions, where the sun rose astern daily with the joy of a giant running his course, bringing assurance of prosperity, and sank to rest ahead smiling, again behind the dimpling clouds which he tinged like mother-of-pearl.

Such was not our lot in the Congress, for we were bound south, across the trades. This, with some bad luck, brought us close-hauled, that we might pass the equator nothing to the westward of thirty degrees of west longitude; otherwise we might fall to leeward of Cape St. Roque. This ominous phrase meant that we might be so far to the westward that the southeast trades, when reached, would not let the ship pass clear of this easternmost point of Brazil on one stretch; that we would strike the coast north of it and have to beat round, which actually happened. Consequently we never had a fair wind, to set a studding-sail, till we were within three or four days of Bahia. This encouraging incident, the first of the kind since the ship went into commission, also befell in one of my mid-watches, and an awful mess our unuse made of it. All the gear seemed to be bent with a half-dozen round turns; the stun'sail-yards went aloft wrong end uppermost, dangling in the most extraordinary and wholly unmanageable attitudes; everything had to be done over and over again, till at last the case looked desperate. Finally the lieutenant of the watch came forward in wrath. He was a Kentuckian, very competent, ordinarily very good-tempered; but there was red in his hair. When he got sufficiently near he tucked the speaking-trumpet under his arm, where it looked uncommonly like a fat cotton umbrella, himself suggesting a farmer inspecting an intended purchase, and in this posture delivered to us a stump speech on our shortcomings. This, I fear, I will have to leave to the reader's imagination. It would require innumerable dashes, and even so the emphasis would be lost. My relief had cause to be pleased that those stun'sails were set by four o'clock, when he came on deck. Ours the labor, his the reward.

* * * * *

A few days more saw us in Bahia; and with our arrival on the station began a round of duties and enjoyments which made life at twenty pleasant enough, both in the passage and in retrospect, but which scarcely afford material for narration. Our two chief ports, Rio de Janeiro and Montevideo, were then remote and provincial. They have become more accessible and modern; but at the time of my last visit—already over thirty years ago—they had lost in local color and particular attraction as much as they had gained in convenience and development. Street-cars, double-ended American ferry-boats, electric lights, and all the other things for which these stand, are doubtless good; but they make places seem less strange and so less interesting. But I suppose there must still be in the business streets that pervading odor of rum and sugar which tells that you are in the tropics; still there must be the delicious hot calm of the early morning, before the sea-breeze sets in, the fruit-laden boats plying over the still waters to the ships of war; still that brilliant access of life and animation which comes sparkling in with the sea-breeze, and which can be seen in the offing, approaching, long before it enters the bay. The balance of better and worse will be variously estimated by various minds. The magnificent scenery of Rio remains, and must remain, short of earthquake; the Sugar Loaf, the distant Organ mountains, the near, high, surrounding hills, the numerous bights and diversified bluffs, which impart continuous novelty to the prospect. It is surprising that in these days of travel more do not go just to see that sight, even if they never put foot on shore; though I would not commend the omission. I see, too, in the current newspapers, that Secretary Root has attributed to the women of Uruguay to-day the charm which we youngsters then found in those who are now their grand-mothers. As Mr. Secretary cannot be very far from my own age, we have here the mature confirmation of an impression which otherwise might be attributed to the facility of youth.

An interesting, though not very important, reminiscence of things now passed away was the coming and going of numerous vessels, usually small, carrying the commercial flags of the Hanse cities, Bremen, Hamburg, and Lubeck, now superseded on the ocean by that of the German Empire. Scarcely a morning watch which did not see in its earlier hours one or more of these stealing out of port with the tail of the land breeze. These remnants of the "Easterlings," a term which now survives only in "sterling," were mostly small brigs of some two hundred tons, noticeable mainly for their want of sheer; that is, their rails, and presumably their decks, were level, without rise at the extremities such as most vessels show.

Up to the middle of the last century, Rio, thanks probably to its remoteness, had escaped the yellow-fever. But the soil and climate were propitious; and about 1850 it made good a footing which it never relinquished. At the time of our cruise it was endemic, and we consequently spent there but two or three months of the cooler season, June to September. Even so, visiting the city was permitted to only a few selected men of the foremast hands. The habits of the seamen were still those of a generation before, and drink, with its consequent reckless exposure, was a right-hand man to Yellow Jack. All shore indulgence was confined to Montevideo, where we spent near half of the year; and being limited to one or two occasions only, of two or three days duration each, it was signalized by those excesses which, in conjunction with the absence of half the crew at once, put an end to all ordinary routine and drill on board. My friend, the captain of the forecastle, who apprehended that the Southern leaders would lose their property, a self-respecting, admirably behaved man in ordinary times, was usually hoisted on board by a tackle when he returned: for Montevideo affords only an open roadstead for big ships, and frequently a rough sea. The story ran that he secured a room on going ashore, provided for the safety of his money, bought a box of gin, and went to bed. This I never verified; but I remember a nautical philosopher among the crew enlarging, in my hearing, on the folly of drink. To its morality he was indifferent; but from sad experience he avouched that it incapacitated you for other enjoyments, regular and irregular, and that he for one should quit. To-day things are changed—revolutionized. There may be ports too sickly to risk lives in; but the men to be selected now are the few who cannot be trusted, the percentage which every society contains. This result will be variously interpreted. Some will attribute it to the abolition of the grog ration, the removal of temptation, a change of environment. Others will say that the extension of frequent leave, and consequent opportunity, has abolished the frenzied inclination to make the most—not the best—of a rare chance; has renewed men from within. Personally, I believe the last. Together with the gradual rise of tone throughout society, rational liberty among seamen has resulted in rational indulgence. "Better England free than England sober."

In the end it was from Montevideo that we sailed for home in June, 1861. During the preceding six months, mail after mail brought us increasing ill tidings of the events succeeding the election of Lincoln. Somewhere within that period a large American steamboat, of the type then used on Long Island Sound, arrived in the La Plata for passenger and freight service between Montevideo and Buenos Ayres. Her size and comfort, her extensive decoration and expanses of gold and white, unknown hitherto, created some sensation, and gave abundant supply to local paragraphists. Her captain was a Southerner, and his wife also; of male and female types. He commented to me briefly, but sadly, "Yes, we have now two governments"; but she was all aglow. Never would she lay down arms; M. Ollivier's light heart was "not in it" with hers; her countenance shone with joy, except when clouded with contempt for the craven action of the Star of the West, a merchant-steamer with supplies for Fort Sumter which had turned back before the fire of the Charleston batteries. Never could she have done such a thing. What influence women wield, and how irresponsible! And they want votes!

In feeling, most of us stood where this captain did, sorrowful, perplexed; but in feeling only, not in purpose. We knew not which became us most, grief, or stern satisfaction that at last a doubtful matter was to be settled by arms; but, with one or two exceptions, there was no hesitancy, I believe, on the part of the officers as to the side each should take. There were four pronounced Southerners: two of them messmates of mine, from New Orleans. The other two were the captain and lieutenant of marines. None of these was extreme, except the captain, whom, though well on in middle life, I have seen stamp up and down raging with excitement. On one occasion, so violent was his language that I said to him he would do well to put ice to his head; an impertinence, considering our relative ages, but almost warranted. I think that he possibly took over the lieutenant, who was from a border State, and, like the midshipmen, rather sobered than enthusiastic at the prospects; though these last had no doubts as to their own course. There was also a sea lieutenant from the South, who said to me that if his State was fool enough to secede, she might go, for him; he would not fight against her, but he would not follow her. I believe he did escape having to fight in her waters, but he was in action on the Union side elsewhere, and, I expect, revised this decision. This halting allegiance, thinking to serve two masters, was not frequent; but there were instances. Of one such I knew. He told me himself that he on a certain occasion had said in company that he would not leave the navy, but would try for employment outside the country; whereon an officer standing by said to him that that appeared a pretty shabby thing, to take pay and dodge duty. The remark sank deep; he changed his mind, and served with great gallantry. It seems to me now almost an impiety to record, but, knowing my father's warm love for the South, I hazarded to the marine captain a doubt as to his position. He replied that there could be no doubt whatever. "All your father's antecedents are military; there is no military spirit in the North; he must come to us." Many Southerners, not by any means most, had formed such impressions.

The remainder of the officers were not so much Northern as Union, a distinction which meant much in the feeling that underlies action. Our second lieutenant, with soberer appreciation of conditions than the marine, said to me, "I cannot understand how those others expect to win in the face of the overpowering resources of the Northern States." The leaders of the Confederacy, too, understood this; and while I am sure that expected dissension in the North, and interference from Europe, counted for much in their complicated calculations, I imagine that the marine's overweighted theory, of incompatibility between the mercantile and military temperaments, also entered largely. My Kentuckian expressed the characteristic, if somewhat crude, opinion, that the two had better fight it out now, till one was well licked; after which his head should be punched and he be told to be decent hereafter. We had, however, one Northern fire-eater among the midshipmen. He was a plucky fellow, but with an odd cast to his eyes and a slight malformation, which made his ecstasies of wrath a little comical. His denunciations of all half measures, or bounded sentiments, quite equalled those of the marine officer on the other side. If the two had been put into the same ring, little could have been left but a few rags of clothes, so completely did they lose their heads; but, as often happens with such champions, their harangues descended mostly on quiet men, conveniently known as doughfaces.

Doughfaces I suppose we must have been, if the term applied fitly to those who, between the alternatives of dissolving the Union and fighting one another, were longing to see some third way open out of the dilemma. In this sense Lincoln, with his life-long record of opposition to the extension of slavery, was a doughface. The marine could afford to harden his face, because he believed there would be no war—the North would not fight; while the midshipman, rather limited intellectually, was happy in a mental constitution which could see but one side of a case; an element of force, but not of conciliation. The more reflective of my two Southern messmates, a man mature beyond his years, said to me sadly, "I suppose there will be bloodshed beyond what the world has known for a long time;" but he naturally shared the prevalent opinion—so often disproved—that a people resolute as he believed his own could not be conquered, especially by a commercial community—the proverbial "nation of shopkeepers." Napoleon once had believed the same, to his ruin. Commercial considerations undoubtedly weigh heavily; but happily sentiment is still stronger than the dollar. An amusing instance of the pocket influence, however, came to my knowledge at the moment. Our captain's son received notice of his appointment as lieutenant of marines, and sailed for home in an American merchant-brig shortly before the news came of the firing on Fort Sumter. When I next met him in the United States, he told me that the brig's captain had been quite warmly Southern in feeling during the passage; but when they reached home, and found that Confederate privateers had destroyed some merchant-vessels, he went entirely over. He had no use for people who would "rob a poor man of his ship and cargo."

Our orders home, and tidings of the attack on Fort Sumter, came by the same mail, some time in June. There were then no cables. The revulsion of feeling was immediate and universal, in that distant community and foreign land, as it had been two months before in the Northern States. The doughfaces were set at once, like a flint. The grave and reverend seigniors, resident merchants, who had checked any belligerent utterance among us with reproachful regret that an American should be willing to fight Americans, were converted or silenced. Every voice but one was hushed, and that voice said, "Fight." I remember a tempestuous gathering, an evening or two before we sailed, and one middle-aged invalid's excited but despondent wish that he was five hundred men. Such ebullitions are common enough in history, for causes bad or good. They are to be taken at their true worth; not as a dependable pledge of endurance to the end, but as an awakening, which differs from that of common times as the blast of the trumpet that summoned men at midnight for Waterloo differs from the lazy rubbing of the eyes before thrusting one's neck into the collar of a working day. The North was roused and united; a result which showed that, wittingly or unwittingly, the Union leaders had so played the cards in their hands as to score the first trick.

Our passage home was tedious but uneventful. I remember only the incident that the flag-officer on one occasion played at old-time warfare of his youth, by showing to a passing vessel a Spanish flag instead of the American. The common ship life went on as though nothing had happened. On an August evening we anchored in Boston lower harbor, and Mr. Robert Forbes, then a very prominent character in Boston, and in most nautical matters throughout the country, came down in a pilot-boat, bringing newspapers to our captain, with whom he was intimate. Then we first learned of Bull Run; and properly mortified we of the North were, not having yet acquired that indifference to a licking which is one of the first steps towards success. Some time after the war was over an army officer of the North repeated to me the comment on this affair made to him by a Southern acquaintance, both being of the aforetime regular army. "I never," he said, "saw men as frightened as ours were—except yours." The after record of both parties takes all the sting out of these words, without lessening the humor.

Immediately upon arrival, the oath of allegiance was tendered, and, of course, refused by our four Southerners. They had doubtless sent in their resignations; but by that time resignations were no longer accepted, and in the following Navy Register they appeared as "dismissed." They were arrested on board the ship and taken as prisoners to Fort Lafayette. I never again saw any of them; but from time to time heard decisively of the deaths of all, save the lieutenant of marines. One of the midshipmen drew from my father an action which I have delighted to recall as characteristic. He wrote from the fort, stating his comradeship with me in the past, and asking if he could be furnished with certain military reading, for his improvement and to pass time. Though suspicions of loyalty were rife, and in those days easily started by the most trivial communication, the books were sent. The war had but just ended, when one morning my father received a letter expressing thanks, and enclosing money to the supposed value of the books. The money was returned; but I, happening to be at home, replied on my own account in such manner as a very young man would. My father saw the addressed envelope, and remonstrated. "Do you think it quite well and prudent to associate yourself, at your age and rank, with one so recently in rebellion? Will it not injure your standing?" I was not convinced; but I yielded to a solicitude which under much more hazardous conditions he had not admitted for himself, though known to be a Virginian. Shortly after his death, while our sorrow was still fresh, I met a contemporary and military intimate of his. "I want," he said, "to tell you an anecdote of your father. We were associated on a board, one of the members of which had proposed, as his own suggestion, a measure which I thought fundamentally and dangerously erroneous. I prepared a paper contesting the project and took it to your father. He read it carefully, and replied, 'I agree with you entirely; but —— will never forgive you, and he is persistent and unrelenting towards those who thwart him. You will make a life-long and powerful enemy. If I were you, I should not lay this upon myself.' I gave way to his judgment, and kept back the paper; but you may imagine my surprise when at the next meeting he took upon himself the burden which he had advised me to shun. He made an argument substantially on my lines, and procured the rejection of the proposition. The result was a hostility which ceased only with his life, but between which and me he had interposed."



VII

INCIDENTS OF WAR AND BLOCKADE SERVICE

1861-1862

The Congress, upon her return, was retained in commission, though entirely useless, either for fighting or blockade, under modern conditions. I suppose there were not yet enough of newer vessels to spare her value as a figure-head. She was sent afterwards to Hampton Roads, where in the following March she, with another sailing-frigate, the Cumberland, fell helpless victims to the first Confederate iron-clad. The staff of combatant sea officers was much changed; the captain, the senior three lieutenants, and the midshipmen being detached. Smith, the fourth lieutenant, remained as first; and, in the absence of her captain on other duty, commanded and fell at her death agony. I was sent first to the James Adger, a passenger-steamer then being converted in New York for blockade duty, for which she was very fit; but in ten days more I was moved on to the Pocahontas, a ship built for war, a very respectable little steam-corvette, the only one of her class—if such a bull as a class of one may be excused. She carried one ten-inch gun and four 32-pounders, all smooth-bores. There was, besides, one small nondescript rifled piece, upon which we looked with more curiosity than confidence. Indeed, unless memory deceive, the projectiles from it were quite as apt to go end over end as true. It was rarely used.

When I joined, the Pocahontas was lying off the Washington Navy-Yard, in the eastern branch of the Potomac, on duty connected with the patrol of the river; the Virginia bank of which was occupied by the Confederates, who were then erecting batteries to dispute the passage of vessels. After one excursion down-stream in this employment, the ship was detached to the combined expedition against Port Royal, South Carolina, the naval part of which was under the command of "Flag-Officer" Dupont. The point of assembly was Hampton Roads, whither we shortly proceeded, after filling with stores and receiving a new captain, Percival Drayton, a man greatly esteemed in the service of the day, and a South-Carolinian. Coincidently with us, but independently as to association, the steam-sloop Seminole, slightly larger, also started. We outstripped her; and as we passed a position where the Confederates were believed to be fortifying, our captain threw in a half-dozen shells. No reply was made, and we went on. Within a half-hour we heard firing behind us, apparently two-sided. The ship was turned round and headed up-river. In a few minutes we met the Seminole, her men still at the guns, a few ropes dangling loose, showing that she had, as they say, not been exchanging salutes. We had stirred up the hornets, and she had got the benefit; quite uselessly, her captain evidently felt, by his glum face and short answers to our solicitous hail. He was naturally put out, for no good could have come, beyond showing the position of the enemy's guns; while an awkward hit might have sent her back to the yard and lost her her share in the coming fray, one of the earliest in the war, and at that instant the only thing in sight on the naval horizon. As no harm resulted, the incident would not be worth mentioning except for a second occasion, which I will mention later, in which we gave the Seminole's captain cause for grim dissatisfaction.

The gathering of the clans, the ships of war and the transports laden with troops, in the lower Chesapeake had of course a strange element of excitement; for war, even in its incipiency, was new to almost all present, and the enthusiasm aroused by a great cause and approaching conflict was not balanced by that solemnizing outlook which experience gives. We lived in an atmosphere of blended exaltation and curiosity, of present novelty and glowing expectation. But business soon came upon us, in its ordinary lines; for we were not two days clear of the Capes, in early November, when there came on a gale of exceptional violence, the worst of it at midnight. It lasted for forty-eight hours, and must have occasioned great anxiety to the heads of the expedition; for among the curious conglomerate of heterogeneous material constituting both the ships of war and transports there were several river steamers, some of them small. Being utterly unpractised in such movements, an almost entire dispersal followed; in fact, I dare say many of the transport captains asked nothing better than to be out of other people's way. The Pocahontas found herself alone next morning; but, though small and slow, she was a veritable sea-bird for wind and wave. Not so all. One of our extemporized ships of war, rejoicing in the belligerent name of Isaac Smith, and carrying eight fairly heavy guns, which would have told in still water, had to throw them all overboard; and her share in the subsequent action was limited to a single long piece, rifled I believe, and to towing a sailing-corvette in the column.

There were some wrecks and some gallant rescues, the most conspicuous of which was that of the battalion of marines, embarked on board the Governor; a steamer, as I recollect, not strictly of the river order, but like those which ply outside on the Boston and Maine coast. She went down, but not before her living freight had been removed by the sailing-frigate Sabine. The first lieutenant of the latter, now the senior rear-admiral on the retired list of the navy, soon afterwards relieved Drayton in command of the Pocahontas; so that I then heard at first hand many particulars which I wish I could now repeat in his well-deserved honor. His distinguished share in the rescue was of common notoriety; the details only we learned from his modest but interesting account. The deliverance was facilitated by the two vessels being on soundings. The Governor anchored, and then the Sabine ahead of her, dropping down close to. The ground-tackle of our naval ships, as we abundantly tested during the war, would hold through anything, if the bottom let the anchor grip.

With very few exceptions all were saved, officers and privates; but their clothes, except those they stood in, were left behind. The colonel was a notorious martinet, as well as something of a character; and a story ran that one of the subalterns had found himself at the start unable to appear in some detail of uniform, his trunks having gone astray. "A good soldier never separates from his baggage," said the colonel, gruffly, on hearing the excuse. After various adventures, common to missing personal effects, the lieutenant's trunks turned up at Port Royal. He looked sympathetically at the colonel's shorn plumes and meagre array, and said, reproachfully, "Colonel, where are your trunks? A good soldier should never separate from his baggage." But, doubtless, to follow it to the bottom of the sea would be an excess of zeal.

Not long afterwards I was shipmate with an assistant surgeon who had been detailed for duty on board the Governor, and had passed through the scenes of anxiety and confusion preceding the rescue. He told me one or two amusing incidents. An order being given to lighten the ship, four marines ran into the cabin where he was lying, seized a marble-top table, dropped the marble top on deck, and threw the wooden legs overboard. There was also on board a very young naval officer, barely out of the Academy. He was of Dutch blood and name—from central Pennsylvania, I think. Although without much experience, he was of the constitutionally self-possessed order, which enabled him to be very useful. After a good deal of exertion, he also came into the cabin. The surgeon asked him how things looked. "I think she will last about half an hour," he replied, and then composedly lay down and went to sleep.

There was in the hero of this anecdote a vein of eccentricity even then, and he eventually died insane and young. I knew him only slightly, but familiarly as to face. He had mild blue eyes and curly brown hair, with a constant half-smile in eyes as well as mouth. In temperament he was Dutch to the backbone—at least as we imagine Dutch. A comical anecdote was told me of him a few years later, illustrating his self-possession—cool to impudence. He was serving on one of our big steam-sloops, a flag-ship at the time, and had charge of working the cables on the gun-deck when anchoring. Going into a port where the water was very deep—Rio de Janeiro, I believe—the chain cables "got away," as the expression is; control was lost, and shackle after shackle tore out of the hawse-holes, leaping and thumping, rattling and roaring, stirring a lot of dust besides. Indeed, the violent friction of iron against iron in such cases not infrequently generates a stream of sparks. The weight of twenty fathoms of this linked iron mass hanging outside, aided by the momentum already established by the anchor's fall through a hundred feet, of course drags after it all that lies unstoppered within. I need not tell those who have witnessed such a commotion that the orderly silence of a ship of war breaks down somewhat. Every one who has any right to speak shouts, and repeats, in rapid succession, "Haul-to that chain! Why the something or other don't you haul-to?" while the unhappy compressor-men, saving their own wind to help their arms, struggle wildly with the situation, under a storm of obloquy. The admiral—by this time we had admirals—was a singular man, something of a lawyer, acute, thinking he knew just how far he might go in any case, and given at times to taking liberties with subordinates, which were not to them always as humorous as they seemed to him. In this instance he miscalculated somewhat. He was on deck at the moment, and when the chain had been at last stopped and secured, he said to the captain, "Alfred, send for the young man in charge of those chains, and give him a good setting-down. Ask him what he means by letting such things happen. Ride him down like a main-tack, Alfred—like the main-tack!" The main-tack is the chief rope controlling the biggest sail in the ship, and at times, close on the wind, it has to be got down into place by the brute force of half a hundred men, inch by inch, pull by pull. That is called riding down, and is clearly a process the reverse of conciliatory. The Dutchman was sent for, and soon his questioning blue eyes appeared over the hatch coaming. Alfred—as my own name is Alfred, I may explain that I was not that captain—Alfred was a mild person, and clearly did not like his job; he could not have come up to the admiral's standard. The latter saw it, and intervened: "Perhaps you had better leave it to me. I'll settle him." Fixing his eyes on the offender, he said, sternly, "What do you mean by this, sir? Why the h—l did you not stop that chain?" This exordium was doubtless the prelude to a fit oratorical display; but the culprit, looking quietly at him, replied, simply, "How the h—l could I?" This was a shift of wind for which the admiral was unprepared. He was taken flat back, like a screaming child receiving a glass of cold water in his face. After a moment's hesitation he turned to the captain, and said meekly, yet with evident humorous consciousness of a checkmate, "That's true, Alfred; how the h—l could he?"

Still, while the defence implied in the lieutenant's question is logically unimpeachable, it does not follow that the method of the admiral—as distinct from his manner, which need not be excused—was irrational. The impulse of reprimand, applied at the top, where ultimate responsibility rests, is transmitted through the intervening links down to the actual culprits, and takes effect for future occasions. As Marryat in one of his amusing passages says: "The master's violence made the boatswain violent, which made the boatswain's mate violent, and the captain of the forecastle also; all which is practically exemplified by the laws of motion communicated from one body to another; and as the master swore, so did the boatswain swear, and the boatswain's mate, and the captain of the forecastle, and all the men." An entertaining practical use of this transmission of energy was made by an acquaintance of mine in China. Going to bed one night, he found himself annoyed by a mosquito within the net. He got up, provided himself with the necessities for his own comfort during the period of discomfort which he projected for others, and called the servant whose business it was to have crushed the intruder. Him he sent in search of the man next above him, him in turn for another, and so on until he reached the head of the domestic hierarchy. When the whole body was assembled, he told them that they were summoned to receive the information that "one piecee mosquito" was inside his net, owing to the neglect of—pointing to the culprit. This done, they were dismissed, in calm assurance that in future no mosquito would disturb his night's rest, and that the desirable castigation of the offender might be intrusted to his outraged companions.

After the gale subsided, the Pocahontas proceeded for the rendezvous, just before reaching which we fell in with a coal-schooner. Though a good fighting-ship, she carried only sixty-three tons of coal, anthracite; for that alone we then used to burn. The amount seems too absurd for belief, and it constituted a very serious embarrassment on such duty as that of the South Carolina and Georgia coasts. To economize, so as to remain as long as possible away from the base at Port Royal, and yet to have the ship ready for speedy movement, was a difficult problem; indeed, insoluble. We used to meet it by keeping fires so low, when lying inside the blockaded rivers, that we could not move promptly. This was a choice between evils, which the event justified, but which might have been awkward had the Confederates ever made a determined attempt at boarding with largely superior force in several steamers, as happened at Galveston, and once even by pulling boats in a Georgia river. Under steam, the battery could be handled; anchored, an enemy could avoid it. With this poor "coal endurance," as the modern expression has it, the captain decided to fill up as he could. We therefore took the schooner in tow, and were transferring from her, when the sound of cannonading was heard. Evidently the attack had begun, and it was incumbent to get in, not only on general principles, but for the captain's own reputation; for although in service he was too well known to be doubted, the outside world might see only that he was a South Carolinian. It was recognition of this, I doubt not, that led Admiral Dupont, when we passed the flag-ship after the action, to hail aloud, "Captain Drayton, I knew you would be here;" a public expression of official confidence. We were late, however, as it was; probably because our short coal supply had compelled economical steaming, though as to this my memory is uncertain. The Pocahontas passed the batteries after the main attack, in column on an elliptical course, had ceased, but before the works had been abandoned; and being alone we received proportionate attention for the few moments of passage. The enemy's fire was "good line, but high;" our main-mast was irreparably wounded, but the hull and crew escaped.

After the action there followed the usual scene of jollification. The transports had remained outside, and now steamed up; bands playing, troops hurrahing, and with the general expenditure of wind from vocal organs which seems the necessary concomitant of such occasions. And here the Pocahontas again brought the Seminole to grief. She had anchored, but we kept under way, steaming about through the throng. Drayton had binoculars in hand; and, while himself conning the ship, was livelily interested in what was passing around. I believe also that, though an unusually accomplished officer professionally, he had done a good deal of staff duty; had less than the usual deck habit of his period. Besides, men used mostly to sails seemed to think steamers could get out of any scrape at any moment. However that be, after a glance to see that we were rightly headed for a clear opening, he began gazing about through his glasses, to the right hand and to the left. He had lost thought of the tide, and in such circumstances as ours a very few seconds does the business. When he next looked, we were sweeping down on the Seminole without a chance of retreat; there was nothing but to go ahead fast, and save the hulls at least from collision. Her flying jib-boom came in just behind our main-mast (we had only two masts); and as the current of course was setting us down steadily, the topping-lifts of our huge main boom caught her jib-boom. Down came one of the big blocks from our mast-head, narrowly missing the captain's head, while we took out of her all the head booms as far as the bowsprit cap, leaving them dragging in helpless confusion by her side. Then we anchored.

It is a nuisance to have to clear a wreck and repair damages; and the injured party does not immediately recover his equanimity after such a mishap, especially coming fresh upon a former instance of trouble occasioned barely a fortnight before. But after a victory all things are forgiven, and the more so to a man of Drayton's well-deserved popularity. A little later in the day he went on board the flag-ship to visit the admiral. When I met him at the gangway upon his return, I had many questions to ask, and among others, "Have you learned who commanded the enemy?" "Yes," he replied, with a half-smile; "it was my brother."

Very soon afterwards he left us, before we again quitted port. He was dissatisfied with the Pocahontas, partly on account of her coal supply; and the captain of the Pawnee then going home, he obtained command of her. The Pawnee was sui generis; in this like the Pocahontas, only a good deal more so, representing somebody's fad. I cannot vouch for the details of her construction; but, as I heard, she was not only extremely broad in the beam, giving great battery space,—which was plain to see,—but the bilge on each side was reported to come lower than the keel, making, as it were, two hulls, side by side, so that a sarcastic critic remarked, "One good point about her is, that if she takes the ground, her keel at least is protected." Like all our vessels at that time, she was of wood. Owing to her build, she had for her tonnage very light draught and heavy battery, and so was a capital fighting-ship in still, shoal waters; but in a seaway she rolled so rapidly as to be a wretched gun platform. Her first lieutenant assured me that in heavy weather a glass of water could not get off the table. "Before it has begun to slide on one roll, she is back on the other, and catches it before it can start." This description was perhaps somewhat picturesque—impressionist, as we now say; but it successfully conveyed the idea, the object of all speech and impressions. However satisfactory for glasses—not too full—it may be imagined that under such conditions it would be difficult to draw sight on a target between rolls. Whatever her defects, the Pawnee was admirably adapted for the inland work of which there was much in those parts, behind the sea islands; and she continued so employed throughout the war. I met her there as late as the last six months of it. But she was not reproduced, and remains to memory only; an incident of the speculative views and doubting progresses of the decade before the War of Secession.

Drayton's successor was one of the senior lieutenants of the fleet, George B. Balch, late the first of the Sabine frigate. His services in saving the people of the Governor have already been mentioned. He still survives in venerable old age; but Drayton, who later on was with Farragut at Mobile, being captain of the flag-ship Hartford and chief of staff at the time of the passage of the forts, was cut off prematurely by a short illness within six months after hostilities ended. Balch remained with us till the Pocahontas returned North, ten months later. He was an officer of varied service, and like all such, some more, some less, abounded in anecdote of his own experiences. A great deal that might be instructive, and more still that is entertaining, is lost by our slippery memories and the rarity of the journal-keeping habit. I remember distinctly only two of his stories. One related to a matter which now belongs to naval archaeology,—"backing and filling in a tideway," by a ship under sail. In this, in a winding channel, the ship sets towards her destination with the current, up or down, carrying only enough canvas, usually the three topsails, to be under control; to move her a little ahead, or a little astern, keeping in the strength of the stream, or shifting position as conditions of the navigation require. Backing is a term which explains itself; filling applies to the sails when so trimmed as to move the vessel ahead. Sometimes a reach of the river permits the sails to be braced full, and she bowls along merrily under way; anon a turn comes where she can only lie across, balanced as to headway by the main topsail aback. Then the smallest topsail, the mizzen, has a game in its hands. The ship, as she drifts up or down, may need to be moved a little astern, more or less, to avoid a shoal or what not; and to do this the sail mentioned is braced either to shake, neutralizing it, or to bring it also aback, as the occasion demands. This rather long preamble is perilously like explaining a joke, but it is necessary. Balch had seen a good deal of this work in China, and he told us that the Chinese pilot's expression, if he wanted the sail shaken, was "Makee sick the mizzen topsail;" but if aback, he added, "Kill him dead." I wonder does that give us an insight into the nautical idiom of the Chinese, who within the limitations of their needs are prime seamen.

By the time I got to China, two years after the War of Secession, steam had relieved naval vessels from backing and filling. I once, however, saw the principle applied to a steamer in the Paraguay River. We were returning from a visit to Asuncion, and had a local pilot, who was needed less for the Paraguay, which though winding is fairly clear, than for the Parana, the lower stream, which finally merges in the Rio de la Plata and is constantly changing its bed. We had anchored for the night just above a bend, head of course up-stream, for the tide does not reach so far. The next morning the pilot was bothered to turn her round, for she was a long paddle steamer, not very handy. He seemed to be in a nautical quandary, similar to that which the elder Mr. Weller described as "being on the wrong side of the road, backing into the palings, and all manner of unpleasantness." The captain watched him fuming for a few minutes, and then said, "Is there any particular trouble on either hand, or is it only the narrowness?" The pilot said no; the bottom was clear. "Well," said the captain, "why not cast her to port, and let her drift till she heads fair for the turn below?" This was done easily, and indeed was one of those things which would be almost foolishly simple did we not all have experience of overlooking expedients that lie immediately under our noses.

Balch's other story which I recall was at the moment simply humorous, but has since seemed to me charged with homely wisdom of wide application. He had made a rather longish voyage in a merchant-steamer, and during it used to amuse himself doing navigation work in company with her master, or mate. On one occasion a discussion arose between them as to some result, and Balch in the course of the argument said, "Figures won't lie." "Yes, that's all right," rejoined the other, "figures won't lie, if you work them right; but you must work them right, Mr. Balch." I was too young then to have noted a somewhat similar remark about statistics; and I think now, after a pretty long observation of mankind, its records and its statements, that I should be inclined to extend that old seaman's comments to facts also. Facts won't lie, if you work them right; but if you work them wrong, a little disproportion in the emphasis, a slight exaggeration of color, a little more or less limelight on this or that part of the grouping, and the result is not truth, even though each individual fact be as unimpeachable as the multiplication table.

After the capture of Port Royal, and the establishment there of the naval base, and until the arrival of monitors a year later, operations of the South Atlantic Blockading Squadron, as it was styled, were confined to blockading. This took two principal forms. The fortifications of Charleston and Savannah being still in the hands of the enemy, and intact, these two chief seaports of that coast were unassailable by our fleet. Even after Fort Sumter had been battered to a shapeless heap of masonry, and Fort Pulaski had surrendered, neither city fell until Sherman's march took it in the rear. But the numerous inlets were substantially undefended against naval attack; and for them the blockade, that tremendously potent instrument of the national pressure, the work of which has been too little commemorated, was instituted almost universally within. Even Fort Pulaski, before its fall, though it sealed the highway to Savannah, could not prevent the Union vessels from occupying the inside anchorage off Tybee Island, completely closing the usual access from the sea to the town. During the ensuing ten months there were very few of these entrances, from Georgetown, the northernmost in South Carolina, down to Fernandina, in Florida, into which the Pocahontas did not penetrate, alone or in company. I do not know whether people in other parts of the country realize that these various inlets are connected by an inside navigation, behind the sea islands, as they are called, the whole making a system of sheltered intercommunication. The usefulness of this was reinforced by the numerous navigable rivers which afford water roads to the interior, and gave a vessel, once entered, refuge beyond the reach of the blockaders' arm, with ready means for distribution. Such a gift of nature to a community, however, has the defects of its qualities. Ease of access, and freedom of movement in all directions, now existed for foe as it had for friend, and the very facility which such surroundings bestow had prevented the timely creation of an alternative. Deprival consequently was doubly severe.

It thus came to pass that, by a gradual process of elimination, blockade in the usual sense of the word, blockade outside, became confined to Charleston and its approaches. It is true that much depended on the class of vessel. It was obviously inexpedient to expose sailing-ships where they might be attacked by steamers, in ground also too contracted for manoeuvring; and two years later I found myself again blockading Georgetown, in a paddle steamer from the merchant service, the size and unwieldiness of which prevented her entering. Moreover, torpedoes had then begun to play a part in the war, though still in a very primitive stage of development. But in 1862 there was little outside work except at Charleston. The very reasons which determine the original selection of a port—facility for entrance, abundant anchorage, and ease of access to the interior for distribution and receipt of the articles of commerce—determine also the accumulation of defences, to the exclusion of other less favored localities. All these conditions, natural and artificial, combined with the Union occupancy of the other inlets to concentrate blockade-running upon Charleston. This in turn drew thither the blockaders, which had to be the more numerous because the harbor could be entered by two or more channels, widely separated. There was thus constituted a blockade society, which contrasted agreeably with the somewhat hermit-like existence of the smaller stations. The weather was usually pleasant enough—many Northerners now know the winter climate of South Carolina—so during the daytime the ships would lift their anchors and get more or less together; the officers, and to a less extent the crews, exchanging visits. Old acquaintanceships were renewed, former cruises discussed, "yarns" interchanged; and then there was always the war with its happenings. Fort Henry, Fort Donelson, Shiloh, the Monitor and Merrimac fight, the capture of New Orleans by Farragut, all occurred during the stay of the Pocahontas upon the blockade in 1862. Our news was apt to be ten days old, but to us it was as good as new; indeed, somewhat better, for we heard of the first reverses at Shiloh, and by the hands of the Merrimac, by the same mail which brought word of the final decided victory. Thus we were spared the anxiety of suspense. Even the disasters about Richmond were not by us fairly appreciated until the ship returned North, when the mortification of defeat was somewhat solaced, and the tendency to despondency lessened, by the happiness of being again at home; in my case after a continuous absence of more than three years, in the Congress and Pocahontas.

Talking of despondency, I had an odd experience of the ease with which people forget their frames of mind. While Burnside was engaged in the movements preceding Fredericksburg, I was in conversation with a veteran naval officer at his own house. Speaking of the probable outcome of the operations in progress, which then engrossed all thoughts, he said to me, "I think, Mr. Mahan, that if we fail this time, we may as well strike"; the naval phrase "strike the colors" being the equivalent of surrender—give up. I dissented heartily; not from any really reasoned appreciation of conditions, but on general principles, as understood by a man still very young. More than two years later, when the war had just drawn to its triumphant close, I again met the same gentleman. Amid our felicitations, he said to me, "There is one thing, Mr. Mahan, which I have never allowed myself to doubt—the ultimate success of our just cause."

After all, it was very natural. When you are cold, you're cold, and when you're hot, you're hot; and if you are indiscreet enough to say so to some one who feels differently, he remembers it against you. What business have you to feel other than he? If, with the thermometer at zero, I chance to say that I wish it were warmer, I am sure of some one, a lady usually, bursting in upon me when it is ninety-five, with the jeer, "Well! I hope, now, you are satisfied." I recall distinctly the long faces we pulled when we reached Philadelphia on our return, and realized, by the withdrawal of McClellan's army to Washington, the full extent of our disasters on the Peninsula; my old commodore might then have found some to say, Amen. But this did not keep our hats any lower when we chucked them aloft over Vicksburg and Gettysburg, and forgot that we had ever felt otherwise.

Vicksburg and Gettysburg, by the way, and their coincidence with the Fourth of July, have furnished me with a reminiscence quite otherwise agreeable. The ship in which I then was spent that Fourth at Spithead, England. We dressed ship with multicolored signals, red, white, and blue, at every yard-arm, big American ensigns at the three mast-heads and the peak, presenting a singularly gay and joyful aspect, which could profitably be viewed from as many points as Mr. Pecksniff looked at Salisbury Cathedral. At noon we fired a national salute, all the more severely punctilious and observant, because by the last mail things at home seemed to be looking particularly blue. The British ships of war, though I fear few of their officers then were other than pleased with our presumed discomfiture, dressed likewise, as by naval courtesy bound, and also fired a salute. The Times of the day arrived from London in due season, and had improved the occasion to moralize upon the sad condition to which the Republic of Bunker Hill and Yorktown was reduced: Grant held up at Vicksburg,[10] Lee marching victoriously into Pennsylvania, no apparent probability of escaping disaster in either quarter. The conclusion was couched in that vein of Pecksniffian benevolence of which we hear so much in life. "Let us hope that so much adversity may be tempered to a nation, afflicted with evil as unprecedented as its former prosperity; and this will indeed be the case if America ... is led on this day of festivity, now converted into a day of humiliation, to review past errors, and to consider that, if her present policy has led her so near ruin, in its reversal must lie the only path that can conduct her to safety." I wonder, if there had been a cable, would that editorial have been headed off. It was not.

"And there it stands unto this day, To witness if I lie."

It was bitter then to my taste; but sweet were the chuckles which I later had, when the actual transactions of that anniversary came to hand.

Whatever their sympathies, the British naval officers during that stay in British waters had no difficulty in paying us all the usual personal attentions; but a particular incident showed for our susceptibilities a nicety of consideration, which could not have been exacted and was very grateful at the time. We were at Plymouth, under the breakwater, but some distance from the inner anchorage, when a merchant-vessel lying inside hoisted a Confederate flag at her mizzen mast-head. We saw it, but of course could do nothing. It was a clear case of intended insult, for the ship had no claim to the flag, and could only mean to flaunt us. It flew for perhaps an hour, and then disappeared. The same day, and not long afterwards, a British lieutenant from a vessel in the harbor came on board, and told me that he had had it hauled down, acting in place of his captain, who was absent. The communication to me, also momentarily in command, was purely personal; indeed, there was nothing official in the whole transaction, nor do I know by what means or by what authority he could insist upon the removal of the flag. However managed, the thing was done, and with the purpose of stopping a rudeness which, it is true, reflected more upon the port than upon us, for I think the offending vessel was British. Very many years afterwards I had occasion to quote this, when, during the Boer War, on the visit of a British squadron to one of our seaside resorts, a resident there thought to show American breeding by hoisting the Four-Color. In the late winter of 1863-64 I again met this officer and his ship in New Orleans. In conversation then he told me he did not believe the Union cause could succeed; that he, with others, looked to see three or four nations formed. In the same month of 1863 this anticipation would not have surprised me; but in 1864 it did, although Grant had not yet begun his movement upon Richmond.

Blockading was desperately tedious work, make the best one could of it. The largest reservoir of anecdotes was sure to run dry; the deepest vein of original humor to be worked out. I remember hearing of two notorious tellers of stories being pitted against each other, for an evening's amusement, when one was driven as a last resource to recounting that "Mary had a little lamb." We were in about that case. Charleston, however, was a blooming garden of social refreshment compared with the wilderness of the Texas coast, to which I found myself exiled a year or so later; a veritable Siberia, cold only excepted. Charleston was not very far from the Chesapeake or Delaware, in distance or in time. Supply vessels, which came periodically, and at not very long intervals, arrived with papers not very late, and with fresh provisions not very long slaughtered; but by the time they reached Galveston or Sabine Pass, which was our station, their news was stale, and we got the bottom tier of fresh beef. The ship to which I there belonged was a small steam-corvette, which with two gunboats constituted all the social possibilities. Happily for myself, I did not join till midway in the corvette's stay off the port, which lasted in all nearly six months, before she was recalled in mercy to New Orleans. I have never seen a body of intelligent men reduced so nearly to imbecility as my shipmates then were.

One of my captains used to adduce, as his conception of the extreme of isolation, to be the keeper of a lightship off Cape Horn; a professional conceit rivalling the elder Mr. Weller's equally profound recognition of the connection between keeping a pike and misanthropy. We off Sabine Pass were banished about equally with the keeper of a turnpike or of a remote lightship. We ought, of course, to have improved the leisure which weighed so heavily on our hands; but the improvement of idle moments is an accomplishment of itself, as many a retired business man has found out too late. There is an impression, derived from the experience of passengers on board ocean steamers, that naval officers have an abundance of spare time. The ship, it seems assumed, runs itself; the officers have only to look on and enjoy. As a matter of fact, sea officers under normal conditions are as busy as the busiest house-keeper, with the care to boot of two, three, four, or five hundred children, to be kept continually doing as they should; the old woman who lived in the shoe had a good thing in comparison. Thus occupied, the leisure habit of self-improvement, other than in the practice of the calling, is not formed. At sea, on a voyage, the vicissitudes of successive days provide the desultory succession of incidents, which vary and fill out the tenor of occupations, keeping life full and interesting. In port, besides the regular and fairly engrossing routine, there are the resources of the shore to fill up the chinks. But the dead monotony of the blockade was neither sea nor port. It supplied nothing. The crew, once drilled, needed but a few moments each day to keep at the level of proficiency; and there was practically nothing to do, because nothing happened that required either a doing or an undoing.