Lord Sheffield, Dec. 8.
Again I have been unsettled, and moving about from place to place,
making my home sometimes on board, sometimes on shore. On examining my
baggage, soon after I joined the Lord Sheffield, I perceived that one of
my boxes was missing; and it has cost me a long, and a very sickly
round, to recover it. In following the Ulysses, which had changed her
birth, we were brought into an open and heavy-swelling sea, the motion
of which made me very unwell, and led me to contemplate the probable
sufferings I shall have to support upon the long voyage we are about to
undertake.
Capt. Jaffray never having been on board a ship of such immense bulk,
availed himself of my necessities, and took the command of the boat,
upon this excursion, in order to look at the vast Commerce de
Marseilles. I wish it were practicable to convey to you, in words, the
sense of grandeur with which the mind is inspired on first approaching
such an enormous floating battery; or to paint to you the sensations
excited by rowing, in a small boat, close below her stern, and her
sides; but it were quite impossible for the pen to describe how
diminutive we felt, or how immense and wonderful she appeared. To
express it by the image of the gnat and the camel, it were necessary to
suppose the former the minutest of its race, and the latter hugely
overgrown. Looking up from our little skiff, the sight was truly awful;
the figure of the ship was forgotten; the hull appeared a mountain, the
masts lofty obelisks erected upon it; and the tremendous batteries,
projecting from her sides, conveyed the idea of a stupendous rock
hanging over us, fortified with many tiers of cannon.
We returned, yesterday, to the Lord Sheffield, and you will be glad to
know that we were accompanied by doctor Cleghorn, who, in consequence of
a new arrangement, is permitted to join our mess; so that we have again
the prospect of crossing the Atlantic pleasantly _en quartette_.
To-day a signal has been made for the fleet to unmoor; and, in
consequence of this, the Lord Sheffield has dropped down from the
Mother-bank to the eastern part of Spithead. Should the wind continue at
the point from which it now blows, we may be to-morrow on our passage.