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Gazing westward up Giudecca, masts and funnels bar the sunset and the Paduan hills; and from a little front room of the trattoria the view is so marine that one keeps fancying oneself in some ship's cabin. Sea-captains sit and smoke beside their glass of grog in the pavilion and the caffé. But we do not seek their company at dinner-time.
During a visit to the English sea-captains, we heard that a French ship, the Julie of Bordeaux, had just sailed in despair, without having completed her cargo, paid for in advance, after waiting nine months in the river, and that Pepel, thinking that we had come on that account, was shaking in his shoes.
Perfectly well known in Spain also, and to the Spanish Guarda-Costas and Sea-Captains in those parts; who were naturally kept in a perennial state of rage by it, and disposed to fly out into flame upon it, when a bad case turned up! Such a case that of Jenkins had seemed to them; and their mode of treating it, by tearing off Mr.
Thus the dozen kingdoms of Spain, the seventeen provinces of the Netherlands, the kingdoms of the Two Sicilies, the duchy of Milan, and certain fortresses and districts of Tuscany, in Europe; the kingdom of Barbary, the coast of Guinea, and an indefinite and unmeasured expanse. of other territory, in Africa; the controlling outposts and cities all along the coast of the two Indian peninsulas, with as much of the country as it seemed good to occupy, the straits and the great archipelagoes, so far as they had been visited by Europeans, in Asia; Peru, Brazil, Mexico, the Antilles the whole recently discovered fourth quarter of the world in short, from the "Land of Fire" in the South to the frozen regions of the North as much territory as the Spanish and Portuguese sea-captains could circumnavigate and the pope in the plentitude of his power and his generosity could bestow on his fortunate son, in America; all this enormous proportion of the habitable globe was the private property, of Philip; who was the son of Charles, who was the son of Joanna, who was the daughter of Isabella, whose husband was Ferdinand.
And at your age before your own innocent woman-child, and leading her into the same excesses. Do you know what that breakfast is? No; I'll tell you. That breakfast is No. 78 in that book of Mrs. Rorer's, and she expressly warns everybody that it can be eaten safely only by steeple-climbers, piano-movers, and sea-captains. Really, Mrs. Wrangleberry, I blush for you." "I don't care how you go on.
There had been a reaction, which suddenly stopped the current of life, at the heart. Thus expired Sir Gervaise Oakes, full of years and of honours; one of the bravest and most successful of England's sea-captains.
He says, in one of his books, "At this time I acquired this accursed habit of solitude." It has been said that the Hawthorne family were, in the earlier generation, afflicted with shyness almost as a disease certainly a curious freak of nature in a family descended from robust sea-captains. It only goes to prove how far away are the influences which control our natures and our actions.
He left to the Pennsylvania Hospital, thirty thousand dollars; to the Deaf and Dumb Asylum, twenty thousand; to the Orphan Asylum, ten thousand; to the Lancaster public schools, the same sum; the same for providing fuel for the poor in Philadelphia; the same to the Society for the Relief of Distressed Sea-Captains and their families; to the Freemasons of Pennsylvania, for the relief of poor members twenty thousand; six thousand for the establishment of a free school in Passyunk, near Philadelphia; to his surviving brother, and to his eleven nieces, he left sums varying from five thousand dollars to twenty thousand; but to one of his nieces, who had a very large family, he left sixty thousand dollars.
Or, if you look through the windows of the Union Marine Insurance Office, you may get a glimpse of him there, nodding over a newspaper, among the old weather-beaten sea-captains who recollect when Time was quite a different sort of fellow.
It is an irreparable loss to history, and a great proof of the darkness of the age and the lamentable neglect of the noble art of book-making, since so industriously cultivated by knowing sea-captains and learned supercargoes, that an expedition so interesting and important in its results should be passed over in utter silence.
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