By the Author’s Son

In the preceding chapter, my father contrasted the solitary bay of San Francisco in 1835, its one, or at most, two vessels and one board hut on shore, with the city of San Francisco in 1859 of nearly one hundred thousand inhabitants and a fleet of large clipper ships and sail of all kind in the harbor, which he saw on his arrival in the steamer Golden Gate bringing the “fortnightly” “mails and passengers from the Atlantic world.” The contrast from 1859 to 1911 is hardly less striking. San Francisco has now grown to over four hundred thousand inhabitants, has twelve daily trains bringing mails and passengers from across the continent and beyond, and steamers six to ten times the size of the Golden Gate. In visiting San Pedro in 1859 he speaks of the landing at the head of a creek where boats discharged and took off cargoes from a mole or wharf, and of how “a tug ran to take off passengers from the steamer to the wharf, for the trade of Los Angeles is sufficient to support such a vessel.” From this landing, a stage-coach went daily to Los Angeles, a town of about twenty thousand inhabitants. Now there is a fine harbor at which large steamers themselves can land at San Pedro and a four-track electric road leading to Los Angeles, now a city of three hundred thousand inhabitants. Trains on this road go at the rate of sixty miles an hour. The picturesqueness, the Aladdin lamp character of the change, would not perhaps be heightened, but certainly the contrast is greater, if the days of 1835 be compared with 1911 instead of 1859, while the startling growth from 1859 to the present makes one pause to ask what will be the progress and the changes in the next fifty-two years.

Of the fate of the vessels since my father wrote “Twenty-four Years After,” little has come to our knowledge. Of the brig Pilgrim, he says, “I read of her total loss at sea by fire off the coast of North Carolina.” On the records of the United States Custom House at Boston is this epitaph, “Brig Pilgrim, owner, R. Haley, surrender of transfer 30 June 1856, broken up at Key West.” Is it not romantic and appropriate that this vessel, so associated with the then Mexican–Spanish coast of California, should have left her bones on the coast of the once Spanish colony of Florida?

A schoolmate of mine dwelling at Yokohama tells us of the fate of the ship Lagoda. This is the vessel that Captain Thompson of the Pilgrim came aboard and “brought his brig with him” (page 137), and to which poor Foster fled (page 154), in fear of being flogged. The Lagoda was under three hundred and forty tons, built at Scituate, Mass., in 1826, of oak with “bluff bows and square stern.” Later she was sold to a New Bedford owner, converted into a bark and turned into a whaler. In 1890, she came to Yokohama much damaged, was officially surveyed and pronounced not worth repair, was sold at auction and bought as a coal hulk for the Canadian Pacific Company’s steamers at that port, and in 1899 was sold to the Japanese, burned and broken up at Kanagawa. The fate of these vessels, with that of the Alert burned at sea by the Alabama, illustrates how vessels, as Ernest Thompson Seton says of wild animals, seldom fail to have a hard, if not a tragic, ending.

It may be interesting to state that the Ayacucho (pronounced I-ah-coo-tsho) was named after the battle fought December 9, 1824, in Peru, South America, in which the Spaniards were defeated by the armies of Columbia and Peru, which battle ended the Spanish rule in America. What became of her after she was sold to the Chilian government as a vessel of war, we do not know.

The Loriotte, we learn, was built at Plymouth, Mass., in 1828, was ninety-two tons, originally a schooner and later changed into an hermaphrodite brig. Gorham H. Nye, her captain and part owner, was born in Nantucket, Mass.

As to persons, there is little to add about Captain Thompson. Captain Faucon gave it as his opinion that Thompson was not a good navigator and that Thompson knew his sailors knew it, and to this cause he attributed in some measure Thompson’s hard treatment of the men. His navigation of the Alert some twelve or fifteen hundred miles westward of the usual course around Cape Horn on the return passage was an instance. It was much criticised by his sailors and officers. It not only greatly lengthened the total distance but brought the vessel into currents that were more antarctic and more frequented with ice than those currents nearer the southwest coast of South America, usually taken advantage of on the trip west to east. In 1880, on my visit to the scenes of “Two Years Before the Mast,” I met a nephew of Captain Thompson at Santa Barbara. He was then the proprietor of the hotel at which I stayed. He invited me to walk with him Sunday afternoon. When we started out together I noticed he had a large, thick cane, while I had none. Could it be he was to wreak vengeance on the son of the man who had exposed his uncle? I was strong and athletic after a year as stroke of the Freshman crew and three years as stroke of the University crew at Harvard. I kept my weather eye open and took care to be a little behind rather than ahead of my companion. At last he began on my father’s story, “Two Years Before the Mast,” and his uncle. Now it is coming, thought I, but to my surprise and relief he detailed a family trouble in which the uncle had tried to get into his own possession land which belonged in part to his brothers and of which he, the captain, had been placed in charge, and my friend, for so I could then think of him, wound up with saying my father had done his uncle perfect justice. The year of Captain Thompson’s death was 1837.

The chief mate of the Pilgrim on her outward voyage, Mr. Andrew B. Amerzeen, was born at Epsom, N.H., June 7, 1806. After returning in the Alert in 1836, as described by my father, his mother prevailed on him to give up long voyages, owing to the fact that his father, a ship owner and master, had been lost at sea with his ship a year or two before. Mr. Amerzeen then made several short voyages to the West Indies and in the fall of 1838 his ship was dismasted in a storm somewhere below Cape Hatteras. He was ill with yellow fever and confined to his stateroom at the time. The ship was worked into one of the southern ports, Savannah I am told, and there Mr. Amerzeen died September 27, 1838, from this fever.

“Jim Hall,” the sailor who was made second mate of the Pilgrim in Foster’s place, after several years’ successful career as Captain and Manager of the Pacific Steamship Navigation Company on the west coast of South America with the title of Commodore, returned to this country, having saved a competence, and settled at East Braintree, Massachusetts. He called on me at my office some ten years after my father’s death. He was six feet tall, a handsome man of striking appearance, with blue eyes, nearly white hair, a ruddy countenance, and a very straight figure for one of nearly eighty years of age. He was born at Pittston, Maine, July 4, 1813. He is said to have commanded twenty-seven different vessels, steam and sail, and never to have had an accident, “never cost the underwriters a dollar.” He died April 22, 1904. His wife (Mary Ann Kimball of Hookset, N.H.) survived him.

Of George P. Marsh, the new hand shipped at San Pedro October 22, 1835, the Englishman with a strange career, we have heard in a letter from Mr. Samuel C. Clarke of Chicago, passenger with Captain Low on the ship Cabot when she took Marsh from the Pelew Islands. Mr. Clarke kept a journal at the time, which confirms in almost every detail the story as told by Marsh, with one or two very minor exceptions but one important difference. He told them when first rescued that he was “a native of Providence, Rhode Island” in America, while to his shipmates in California he always said he was a native of England and brought up on a smuggler. By a letter from his nephew, Edward W. Boyd, we learn that his real name was George Walker Marsh, that he was the eldest son of a retired English army officer and his wife, and was born in St. Malo, France, hence his knowledge of the French language. He went to sea against their will but communicated with them several times afterwards. After he left to join the Ayacucho in Chili, all trace of him was lost at Valparaiso.

Captain Edward Horatio Faucon, who took out the Alert and brought back the Pilgrim, continued, after my father’s last chapter, to live at Milton Hill where he still kept “the sea under his eye from the piazza of his house.” He was occasionally employed by Boston marine underwriters on salvage cases, going to many places, from St. Thomas, W.I., and the Bermudas, to Nova Scotia in the north. He was a constant reader, chiefly interested in history, political economy and sociology. He made visits, annually or oftener, on my mother until his death on May 22, 1894. We all remember his keen eye, erect figure, quiet reserve, and old-time courtesy of manner, and his personal interest in those who come and go in ships, and more particularly in those of the Alert, his favorite ship. He was born in Boston, November 21, 1806. His father, Nicolas Michael Faucon, was a Frenchman of Rouen, who fought in the Napoleonic wars with distinction as Captain of the Second Regiment of the Hussars, and came to this country, where he married Miss Catherine Waters at Trinity Church, Boston. He was instructor in French at Harvard, 1806–1816. Our Captain Faucon left a widow and daughter, and a promising son, Gorham Palfrey Faucon, a Harvard graduate, a well-trained civil engineer in the employ of large railroads, and, like his father, interested in literature and public problems. He died in 1897, in the early prime of life.

The third mate, James Byers Hatch, whom Captain Faucon in a letter to us called “one of the best of men,” continued to command large sailing vessels on deep sea voyages with some mishaps and narrow escapes. While in California on one of these voyages he found James Hall on board another ship at the same wharf, and in a letter to Captain Faucon written June, 1893, says, “I persuaded him to take the first officer’s berth, and what an officer he was!! Everything went on like clockwork. I do not think I ever found the least fault with him during the whole time he was with me.” Captain Hatch lost his only son, a lad of seven, on a voyage to Calcutta. “The boy,” said he, “fell from the top of the house on the poop deck and died in about a week.” His wife and married daughter both died in 1881. He himself settled in Springfield, Mass., his birthplace, and lost almost all he had saved in some unsuccessful business venture in that city, and lived a rather lonely and sad life. In the above letter he said, “I am now ready and anxious to leave this earth and take my chance in the next.” He died at Springfield soon after 1894.

Benjamin Godfrey Stimson, the young sailor about my father’s age, was born in Dedham, Mass., March 19, 1816. It came naturally to him to go to sea, for his great-uncle Benjamin Stimson commanded the colonial despatch vessel under Pepperell, in the siege of Louisburg. After settling in Detroit in 1837, he married a Canadian lady (Miss Ives), owned many lake vessels, including the H. P. Baldwin, the largest bark of her day on the great lakes, and was Controller of that city from 1868 to 1870, during which time the city hall was built by him at less than estimated cost. He died December 13, 1871, leaving a widow and two sons, Edward I. and Arthur K. Stimson. The agent Alfred Robinson died in 1895.

Jack Stewart I met in San Diego on my visit there in 1881, as I have stated in the Introduction. He was quite a character in the “old” town and made a good deal of his being one of the crew of the Alert. He died January 2, 1892, leaving children and grandchildren. Henry Mellus, who went out before the mast and left the Pilgrim to be agent’s clerk ashore, and whom my father met at Los Angeles in 1859, was made mayor of that city the very next year.

Last, but not least, from the point of view of friendship, was my father’s “dear Kanaka” (Hope), whose life my father saved (by getting ship’s medicines from the mate, after Captain Thompson had refused to give them), and for whom he had so much real affection. The last mention we have of Hope is found in my father’s journal under date of May 24, 1842.

“Horatio E. Hale called. Been away four years as Philologist to the Exploring Expedition. Was in San Francisco three months ago and saw the Alert there collecting hides. Also saw ‘Hope’ the Kanaka mentioned in my ‘Two Years.’ Hope desired his Aikane to me — Remembered me well. Hale said his face lighted up as soon as my name was mentioned to him.”

As to all the rest of the officers and crews, they have doubtless all handed in their last account and taken passage across the Unknown Sea to the other world.

Of the “fascinating” Do?a Angustias dela Guerra, whose graceful dancing with Don Juan Bandini in Santa Barbara during the ceremonies attending the marriage of her sister, Do?a Anita with Mr. Robinson, the Agent, in January, 1836, my father describes (pages 300–305), something more is to be said.

On my visit to Santa Barbara in 1880, I had the privilege of seeing her. I was much impressed with her graceful carriage, her face still handsome, though she was then sixty-five years of age, with her dignity, calm self-possession, and above all with her true gentility of manner and evidently high character and purpose, together with a delightful humor, which shone in her eyes. General Sherman, in a letter as late as 1888, says of her, she “was the finest woman it has been my good fortune to know,” and Bayard Taylor in El Dorado (Putnam’s edition of 1884, page 141) writes, “she is a woman whose nobility of character, native vigor and activity of intellect, and above all, whose instinctive refinement,” etc.

In 1847, when our officers took possession of California, she, a Mexican, of the first Mexican family of California, took care of the first United States officer who died in Monterey, Lieutenant Colville J. Minor, an enemy to her country, for which service she received a letter of thanks from the First Military Governor, dated August 21, 1848.

She died January 21, 1890, at the age of seventy-five. The name of her first husband was Don Manuel Jimeno and of her second Dr. Ord. Caroline Jimeno was the daughter “as beautiful as her mother” that Mr. Dana met in 1859, then a young lady of seventeen. Her daughter by the second marriage, Rebecca R. Ord, an “infant in arms” when my father saw her in 1859, married Lieutenant John H. H. Peshine of the United States Army, who in 1893 was made First Military Attaché to the Court of Madrid.

The dela Guerra family of California, I am told, is dying out in the male line and will soon leave no representative.

As to Richard Henry Dana, Jr.,1 the author of the book, the reader may wish to know something. He came back from his two years’ trip in 1836 “in a state of intellectual famine, to books and study and intercourse with educated men.” He had left his class at Harvard at the end of the sophomore year (1833), on account of the trouble with his eyes and sailed about a year later. When he returned, September, 1836, his class had graduated in the summer of 1835, but with a little study he passed the examinations for the then senior class, which he entered late in the autumn of 1836. On graduation in 1837 he not only stood first, but “had the highest marks that were given out in every branch of study.” He took the Bowdoin prize for English prose composition and the first Boylston prize in elocution. He then entered the Law School and became instructor in elocution under Professor Edward T. Channing, and during this period wrote the “Two Years Before the Mast.” In February, 1840, he went into the office of Charles G. Loring and in the following September opened his own office and began the active practice of law. He was born August 1, 1815, at Cambridge, Mass., with a line of ancestors reaching back to the early days of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, with several colonial governors in the maternal lines. His great grandfather, Richard Dana, was one of the early patriots, a “Son of Liberty,” who frequently presided at the meetings at Faneuil Hall at which Otis, Adams and others spoke. This man’s son, my father’s grandfather, Francis Dana, was several times member of the State Colonial Legislature and of the Continental Congress. He was one of the signers of the Articles of Confederation and married Elizabeth Ellery, the daughter of William Ellery, one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence. Francis Dana had been sent abroad on a special mission to England in 1774 before the breaking out of the Revolutionary War, to sound English public opinion, for which he had unusual advantages. He returned in the late spring of 1776 advising independence, and soon after this the Declaration of Independence was signed. Francis Dana was also appointed on a special mission to Paris and Holland with John Adams, later was made Minister to Russia, and after the peace with Great Britain was made Chief Justice of Massachusetts. Mr. Dana’s own father, Richard Henry Dana, Senior, was a poet and literary critic and a founder of the “North American Review.” Young Richard was brought up in very moderate circumstances. His grandfather, who had accumulated a good deal of property, lost the larger part of it through unfortunate investments in canals by a relation, in which he had himself become more deeply involved than he supposed. I remember my father’s saying that his spending money for one whole term consisted of twenty-five cents, which he carried in his pocket in cases of emergencies. He walked to and from Boston to save omnibus fares, had no carpet on his college room and had no chore-man to black his boots and fetch his water and fuel. This, however, was the usual custom in his day with all but the rich collegian. The necessities of life did not then demand so high a rate of “living wage” as today.

He entered on this sea experience with his eyes open. He had the opportunity of going on a long voyage as a passenger, but he refused it, and resolutely took the harder way of accomplishing his purpose of toughening himself. A little incident of his boyhood gives a hint of his pluck. His schoolmaster, angry at what he chose to call “disobedience” on the excuse of a “pretended” illness, told the boy to put out his left hand. “Upon this hand,” wrote Dana years afterward, “he inflicted six blows with all his strength, and then six upon the right hand. I was in such a frenzy of indignation at his injustice and his insulting insinuation, that I could not have uttered a word for my life. I was too small and slender to resist, and could show my spiri............