On the afternoon of the 15th of December, all hands being on board,
with coal dust, and wine for distinguished functionaries in the U. S.
on our decks, an orange and banana smell over the ship, and six little
Madeira bullocks, who, upon being hoisted in by the horns, no sooner
reached the decks, than they indulged in a series of cavortings, to the
no small amusement of the old shell-back denizens of the forecastle,
we lifted anchor, and steamed away from Funchal, to the south. At
nightfall Madeira’s lines of green, and basalt, and red soil, were lost
to view.
We were now entering on the longest run we anticipated making during
the cruise. On the second morning out at an early hour we made Palma,
one of the westernmost of the Canary islands. When the sun came up from
behind it, defining its sharp peaks and irradiating the whole outline
of the island, I had the happy consciousness that it fully compensated
me for the rupture of my matinal slumbers, necessary to get a glimpse
of it. The celebrated peak of Teneriffe was wrapped in cloud when we
passed, and I did not see it; though others with “optics sharp,” at one
time, said they discerned it in the extreme distance. We subsequently
passed in sight of the Cape de Verde islands. During the day we ran
into what is termed the incipient northeast trades, and as our coal was
not deemed sufficient for the run before us, the engines were stopped,
twenty tons of water blown from the boilers, fires extinguished,
sufficient number of the paddles removed from the wheels, which were
lashed, the large smoke stack lowered on the hurricane deck, and the
ship put under sail. Many of us thought if the Japanese could only
get a sight of the funnel as it lay in its chocks like another huge
“peace-maker” when we reached their country, they would prove quite
accessible. The spars of the Mississippi being tall, she spread a great
deal of canvass, but the wind continuing quite light we made but little
progress for several days. A whale saluted us by tapping his head
against our port guard. On the 18th we tacked ship, and on the 21st we
got the trade-winds proper, and under studding-sails ran quite well.
Life on the ocean, monotonous, nearly, at all times, was rendered more
so to us, by the transition from a steamer to a sailing ship. To study
on shipboard, or even to read with profit, as I had heard before, is
next to impossible, unless it may be with an old sea-dog to whom for
some forty years the “ocean has been a dwelling-place.” Try it, and you
will find your eyes wandering from the type, and your thoughts bolting
from the subject, like a refractory quarter-horse over a track railing.
The weekly routine of the ship was comprised in going to quarters,
morning and evening, for inspection; and once a week the whole ship’s
company are beat to general quarters, when the magazines are open, the
powder-boys busy in passing and repassing cartridge-boxes, the guns
are cast loose and worked by their crews, boarders are called away,
pikemen are posted to repel boarders, marines are stationed near them,
&c.; the master gives his orders for sail-trimmers to put stoppers on
such portions of the rigging, as an active imagination suggests must
have been shot away, and all the evolutions of an actual engagement at
sea are gone through; together with exercise at fire-quarters, when
an alarm with the ship’s bell is rung, at which sentinels are placed
at the falls of each boat, so that in an actual emergency there could
be none of the inhuman desertion and infamous flight which marked
the sad catastrophe of the “Arctic.” All of these exercises, which
increase the discipline of a crew and the efficiency of a ship, are of
course possessed of more interest to those officers who have military
duties to perform on board, than others, who are too apt to experience
the indifference of the Emerald isle native, who being informed that
the house was on fire, replied it was nothing to him, he “was only a
boarder.”
The weather we experienced in the trades was very pleasant, though it
became hot with much suddenness. Pretty white clouds trooped across the
sky like pilgrims in white, bound to Mecca. The regular waves as they
came chasing one another from the horizon, rolled the whitest caps,
and the sea was of the bluest, particularly as the lashed arms of our
wheels divided the water in their passage, and the wheel-houses keeping
off the direct rays of the sun, made it exquisitely transparent. Though
the dews at night were so heavy that the moisture would run like
rain off the awnings, yet the shadows of the big sails that had gone
to sleep from the steadiness of the wind, made deeper by the bright
moonlight and the illuminated image of the engine of our Savior’s
agony—the “southern cross”—with its twinkling stars looking down from
the sky, made one forget that the distance from the coast of Africa was
not the greatest, and that the wearing of a thick coat at night, was a
decided improvement on a thin one. Porpoises were almost in the daily
practice of thrusting their swinish nozzles upon public attention,
and innumerable graceful little flying-fish, disturbed by our passage
through the water, or chased by the dolphin, flew continually across
the waves ahead of us, like flocks of sparrows over briers. But then we
had the smallpox on board, on the person of a Portuguese boy shipped at
Funchal, and the possibility of contracting this loathsome disease, or
the possession of an arm rather sore from vaccination, did not make the
run more pleasurable.
The events of Christmas day were, that we were in 13° 23′ north
latitude, and 23° 48′ west longitude; a very pleasant repast was spread
by the ward-room, where “home with all its endearments” was drunk in
Serchal; and a poor little bird very much resembling the partridge
of our own country, was blown aboard. This little representative of
Africa’s feathery race fell a victim to the taxidermist aboard. What he
thought previous to his demise, of the day, I know not, but to me it
was not Christmas; and no mental effort could “bring back the features
that joy used to wear” when the mistletoe was hung, and the back log
placed; nor could the defunct gobbler, who lately bestrode our coop,
sole tenant, now lying in very brown state on a festive table, even
provoke the pleasant memories.
The next day, promulgated by Commodore M. C. Perry, and signed by the
then hiatus secretary of the navy, Mr. Swallow-Barn Kennedy, was read
on the quarter-deck, General Order, No. 1, which, it is said, had a
precedent in the expedition of Lieut. Wilkes, but which was as bad as
its precedent, and equally unjust, being based upon the ridiculous
premise that because a government may have claim upon your thews and
sinews, or your mental aptitude in the line of your profession, that
it likewise has property in the product of your brain, no matter in
what other way, out of your calling, it may be exercised. This order
was violated subsequently in China, in the grossest way, with the
tacit consent of the commander-in-chief who first issued it; as if
the prominent, in rule, or law, under our government were any more
exempt from its provisions, than that the humblest are not beneath its
control. I say in the grossest way, because he permitted, if he did not
personally supervise, the preparation of an account of the movements
of his squadron, for the colonial English newspapers at Hong-Kong,
in preference to our own; papers too, whose columns at other times
displayed the village squabbling, which marked the thunders, of the
“Eatanswill Gazette” in Pickwick, in response to the shafts of “The
Independent.”
The following is the order:—
“_U. S. Steam Frigate, Mississippi_,
“_At Sea, December 21st, 1852_.
“GENERAL ORDER, NO. 1
“In promulgating the subjoined extract from the instructions addressed
to me by the honorable secretary of the navy, and bearing date 13th
ult., I have to enjoin upon all officers and other persons attached to
the vessels under my command, or in any other way connected with the
squadron, a most rigid adherence to all the requirements of said order.
“Whatever notes or drawings may be prepared by the officers or other
persons before mentioned, whether by special order, or by their own
volition, will be endorsed by the respective parties, and transmitted
through the captain of the fleet to the commander-in-chief, who will
in due time lodge them at the navy department, from whence they may be
reclaimed as it may suit the convenience of the government.
“All arms, curiosities, and specimens of natural history, are also
to become the property of the United States, unless voluntarily
relinquished by the commander-in-chief.
“M. C. PERRY,
“_Commander of the U. S. Naval Forces_,
“_Stationed in the East India, China, and Japan Seas_.”
[EXTRACT.]
“A subject of great importance to the success of the expedition, will
present itself to your mind in relation to communications to the prints
and newspapers, touching the movements of your squadron, as well as
in relation to all matters connected with the discipline and internal
regulations of the vessels composing it. You will therefore enjoin upon
all under your command to abstain from writing to friends and others
upon these subjects, the journals and private notes of the officers and
other persons in the expedition must be considered as belonging to the
government until permission be received from the navy department to
publish them.”
The effect of this order was to cause officers to decline keeping
journals, and only note down their previous conceptions and present
impressions of things and places seen, in their letters to relatives.
In 8° north of the equator we became becalmed, when the paddles were
put on and we steamed away about eight knots. Our drinking water
about this time showed a degree of _vitality_ which was not made more
agreeable by the fact that the naval regulations did not allow the
wearing of the mustache, even for straining purposes.
About ten o’clock on the last night of ’52 there was a cry from the
poop-deck of “man overboard!” when the engines were stopped, and the
life-buoys suspended from either quarter of the ship were attempted to
be gotten away, but not going quickly, nor their matchlocks igniting
from some cause, gratings were hove overboard, lights sent up in
the mizzen-top, and a metallic boat, the 2d cutter, in which went
Lieutenant Webb, and Passed Midshipman K. R. Breese, was lowered and
went in search of the unfortunate man. There was much solicitude felt
for the poor fellow by those who stood on the poop peering into the
darkness astern, eager to hear the least sound that indicated the man
still afloat, but it was scarcely shown by the scene enacted during
the absence of the boat. Up came the commodore: “What’s the bearing
of that star?—Where did that man fall from?” _Voice_:—“Show the
Commodore where the man fell from!”—man goes over to port side—“Take
care of the paint!” “How does she head?” After a lapse of fifteen or
twenty minutes the boat was heard returning, when the following was
the hail:—“Mr. Webb?”—“Sir?”—“Have you got the buoy?”—“Yes, sir.”—
“Have you got that man?” _Answer_: “Yes, sir,” which was one of much
gratification, as every one regarded him as gone. The boat it appeared,
had passed him, and having given up the search, was returning, and
would have pulled over him, but for his being discovered in time by a
bow-oarsman. He was floating without effort on the surface, although
there was considerable sea on at the time. The poor fellow upon being
taken on board was found to have swallowed a great deal of water, and
it was thought that he might die from congestion of the lungs. He
had the antithetical name of Dry, and his mind being afterward found
affected, he was sent home in a merchant-ship from the Cape of Good
Hope.
We crossed the equator on the 3d of January, in longitude 11° west, and
when the “sun came up on the left” on the morning of the 10th, right
ahead, perhaps in the very track of the Northumberland, looming sternly
up from out the ocean, like the dark high walls of an ocean-prison that
it is, we saw St. Helena. The tallest peak, that of Diana, is visible
in the clouds for a great distance. At mid-day we anchored in the
roadstead fronting James’ town, and shortly after saluted the flag of
England with twenty-one guns. At no time, during a cruise of two years
and over, did I hear any reverberation from our heavy pieces, half so
magnificent. The sound of each explosion, at first seemed to recoil
from the face of the immense rock which upreared itself in front, and
then as if gathering strength from the temporary rebuff, it broke, in
and up the wedge-shaped valley in which James’ town is situated, and
appearing for a moment to die away, again went on over gorge and peak,
tumbling, roaring, thundering in the distance, as if “Jura answered
through her misty shroud.” The salute was returned by one of the number
of forts that were looming away above us on the island.
In shore of us lay a number of sharp rakish-looking little vessels,
slavers, that had been captured by the English cruisers, on the African
station, and brought to the island to be adjudged by a local court of
admiralty; better than our system where captor and prize have to return
frequently, great distances to the United States.
The landing at St. Helena is made on a mole at one end of the small
beach that lies only immediately in front of James’ town. A few
minutes’ walk, and crossing a drawbridge, over a moat, you pass through
an embattled wall, from which some iron pieces frown down on you, by a
lofty gate, at which sentinels are always posted. On getting inside,
a triangular street made of rolled gravel is before you. On the left
are the guard quarters, the governor’s house and offices, and a public
garden; on the right a church, hotel, and the ascent to Ladder hill,
where is situated the highest fort of the place, reached by six hundred
and twenty-five steps. Right before you, running from the apex of the
triangle, is the road which leads to the spot which has made St.
Helena famous, and England infamous for ever. As you ascend this road,
you may look down on the settlements of the Chinese who have left the
flowery kingdom to dwell in this place of isolation and desolation;
also see the fine English soldier as he is being closely drilled from
company to battalion, not by duke of Cambridge, or Earl Cardigan, all
of whose bravery will not make up for want of tactical knowledge, but
by sergeants.
Our stay at the island was to be only until we could get coal enough
aboard to take us to Cape Town, and so on the following morning I
started for Longwood and the now vacant tomb of Napoleon. I was not
aware when I started on foot, that I had to walk a distance before
returning to the town, of nine miles, and that too over a road of
lava formation, and under the burning rays of a vertical sun. The
ascent, at the first, is very great. Much fagged on reaching the summit
point I sat down to rest, and surveyed the scene around. Near me on a
road-stone, his bridleless and heavily-ladened little donkey cropping
thistles not far off, in his parti-colored dress sat a Lascar quietly
discussing his cigar. On the stone which he occupied, I read “1124
distance: 1180 feet elevation.” The road in the direction in which I
was going was shut in by clumps of brushwood and some scrubby pines,
above which, far away—its ragged top currying away the bottoms of the
southeast trade-clouds which, blowing continually over the island,
ever and anon drop their genial drops on the arid earth beneath—rose
Diana’s peak hundreds of feet in air. But the view looking seaward: Sir
Joshua Reynolds said that the horizon-line of the great and wide sea in
mid-deep is one of the most striking emblems of the infinite and the
eternal to be found in all the works of the Almighty. This idea, of
all other places, arises in the mind when gazing from the eminences of
St. Helena; but then, as you look upon “the sea here, the sea there,
the sea all around,”—contrasted with the vast expanse, how small in
the imagination becomes the spot on which you stand, and how coffined
before death, must have felt the great spirit, to whom all Europe was
once a theatre,—_qui fait le tour du monde_!
From where I sat, I could see in the gorge beneath, very plainly, the
“Briers,” the home and habitation of Napoleon until Longwood could be
gotten ready for his reception. It is situated behind a naked, stony
hill, and must have been a warm abode, but Napoleon liked it for its
quaintness and solitude; preferring it to better houses in the town,
where privacy would have been impossible. The place is enclosed by low
walls and rows of the prickly pear. On resuming my tramp, I passed some
swarthy-featured, black-haired, fine-formed young women, barefooted,
and lightly clad, carrying bundles of twigs on their heads, with which
they walked, with apparently perfect indifference, notwithstanding the
steepness of road and the intense rays of the sun. I soon reached and
went by an old cottage in decay, a rusty signal-gun, a wayside inn
with an embowered doorway, and then passing through a lane of trees,
I entered upon a level road, which, in the space of three quarters of
a mile, turned in crescent to the left. Some distance below, within
this crescent, a lot of fir, cypress, and other trees, with grassy
sod, terminated a small valley which commenced in desolation from the
seaside. This spot was enclosed by a low, straggling fence, having
a kind of sentry-box at its gate, and contains the vacant tomb of
Napoleon. I descended to the place, paid the shilling entrance required
of me, and entered the enclosure. The willow-tree which so invariably
figured in all drawings of the spot, is now gone. The grave is enclosed
by a plain iron railing, and, when I saw it, covered over with an
awning. Its present appearance is that of the strong foundation of an
elongated old spring-house, lined with cement. It is eight feet deep,
having at the bottom a small recess sunk below the general level, which
received the coffin, and about five feet wide. Desirous of getting the
exact measurement of so much greatness, one of our party stretched
himself at full length in this lower deep, but its chilliness soon
made him have as little desire to continue there, as the old hero of
New Orleans had to repose after death in the sarcophagus of one of
the Cæsars, which the very considerate kindness of a commodore had
brought for him. The whole surface of the plastering down in the tomb
is covered with scarcely-legible names, or petty ambition’s trashy
verses. The same very limited aspiration is to be seen in the pages
of a register kept at the place, where the national animosities of
visiting-strangers play shuttlecock and battledore. The obstinate and
collected Englishman repeats the commonplace of Sir Walter Scott, in
wishing you to behold the spot which held him for whom the earth was
once too small, or ethically informs you, that one life being taken
constitutes murder, but that of thousands makes a hero; then comes
the mercurial Frenchman, who, after relieving himself by a great big
“_sacre_” on the English nation generally and the island jailer in
particular, says Napoleon is avenged, for Hudson Lowe “_est mort_;” or
breaks out with “_J’ai vu: J’ai maudit!_” Next comes that peripatetic
philosopher, Jonathan, who, smacking as usual of the shop, furnishes
the edifying information that he belongs to the “Mary Brown, of New
Bedford, has bin out over two years, and hain’t got but four hundred
barrils of oil; hopes to be to ‘hum’ soon; and stopping at the island,
has just come out to see Boney’s tomb!”
When the tomb contained the body of the great emperor, it was filled
to within one foot of the surface, with earth, and covered in mound
form with cement. The three slabs that closed the grave, were taken
from the kitchen hearth of the Longwood jail. A _cicerone_, in the
person of a gray-haired old negro woman, who saw both the interment and
the exhumation of the remains of Napoleon, tells you in an Ethiopic
vernacular, of the incidents of the spot; after enumerating the number
of coffins in which the body was placed, she said, “Dare, sir, laid
his head, and here was his feet.”—“He always used to drink at dat dare
spring, dare.”—“I’s seen him many a time come down dat hill dare wid
his snuff-box and one of General Bertram’s children.”—“When he used
to stop still, he’d do jest so”—folding her arms. She was also quite
minute in her mention of the “Prince de Jonnyville” in the “Belpooly.”
The spot was pointed out to me where Bertrand, Gourgaud, Las Casas,
and Marchand, erected the tent to put the body under after exhumation,
which took place amid wind and rain. All around the tomb was wet and
miry; in times of heavy rains, now, the tomb is not unfrequently filled
with water. The work of disinterment was begun after midnight, and by
seven o’clock in the morning the stones that closed the lower vault
were raised. The anvil employed by the men engaged upon the work to
keep their tools in order, sank at every blow, and the men were ankle
deep in mud. I have nothing pathetic or philosophic to add, upon the
spot;
“Si ta tombe est vide Napoleon?
Ton nom ne remplit il pas l’universe.”
Ascending the hill on the other side, by a winding path which led up
through a pretty garden, I stopped at the little residence of “Hutt’s
gate,” formerly occupied by General Bertrand, with his family, previous
to moving out to the building in the vicinity of Longwood. After
resting here, I footed it a mile further, to the outer entrance to the
grounds of Longwood. The prospect before me during this walk was of the
dreariest and most desolate kind, presenting the most marked contrast
to the verdure at the tomb. It was along this road that Napoleon walked
to his favorite spring, and over which his Chinese coolies carried his
water from it. After passing a dilapidated wall and gate, you enter
upon a lawn of some hundred yards, on one side of which are straggling
fir-trees, bent down in the same direction by the continual pressure
of the southeast trade-winds, which are felt at this part of the
island very strongly, and the other side was hedged by a long row of
the stately aloe. In a few minutes you are in front of a dilapidated
low building, with a small verandah in front of one of its wings, and
partly enclosed in an old stone wall. This is Longwood as it now is.
When I reached it, the place looked abandoned in the extreme, with the
exception of the cows and a scrawny donkey that browsed around, or a
solitary turkey who broke the silence with his gobble. There was the
decayed and silent guard-house and signal-tower, its halyards rotted
away and pole tottering, from which the restless bunting was for ever
telling by day to the sedulous jailer at “Plantation House” how his
great prisoner at Longwood, after the mental exhaustion of dictation,
or the fatigues of a morning walk, now slept, or that, having slept, he
was now feeding his pet fishes in the little pond in the rear of his
cell abode. This quiet was soon broken; a dirty-faced, uncombed-haired
English girl approached, and informed us that the fee for admission
to the house was two shillings—Longwood, like the grounds around the
tomb, being leased by the government to others, for the purpose of
speculating on the interest of association connected with the great
emperor. If we are the “dollar people,” can any man who has ever
visited English domain say, that they are not entitled to the name of
“shilling nation!”
The first room you enter on going into the house, is the one in which,
amid storm and rain, and when
“Far along,
From peak to peak, the rattling crags among,
Leapt the live thunder,”
its booming reaching the now drowsy ear which was once attuned to the
roar of cannon on a hundred fields, with the ejaculation of “_tête
d’armée_” on his nearly motionless lips, died Napoleon. The head of
his bed rested against the sill of a window, from underneath which
the French have removed the stone, and placed it in the Hospital des
Invalides as a precious relic. Through the sashless opening, the sun
now streams in on the floor of a room occupied by a thrashing-machine,
and with a manger overhead; while the room in which he mostly slept,
and ate, and read, is now paved with cobble-stones, and filled with
horse-stalls. The fish-pond is dry, and the grave of his favorite horse
you can not find.
Just across the road I visited the new house of Longwood, its walls
sound, its porticoes and floors in a perfect state of preservation, and
its spacious rooms unoccupied. Napoleon visited it once, but feeling
that one jail was no less one for being better built than another,
spurned this offer of the English to conciliate him in his cage, as the
lion spurns the leavings of the jackal though he die in his den.
On my way back to James’ town, I passed in sight of the grounds and
former mansion of
“The paltry jailer and the prying spy”—
“Plantation house”—but had no desire to visit it.
At James’ town there is a very fine bust of Napoleon, said to have
been made from a plaster cast of the face, taken after death; the
nose is much more exquisitely chiselled and beautiful than any other
representation to be seen of his face.
Before nightfall on the 11th of January, we were under way for the Cape
of Good Hope from St. Helena.
“The fleets that sweep before the eastern blast,
Shall hear their sea-boys hail it from the mast;
When Victory’s Gallic column shall but rise,
Like Pompey’s pillar, in a desert’s skies,
The rocky isle, that holds, or held his dust,
Shall crown the Atlantic like the hero’s bust.”