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Updated: August 5, 2024
He was a very pleasant, chatty young fellow, remarkably free and unreserved in his manner for a Spaniard and whilst I was shifting my rig, and subsequently partaking of some refreshments which had been laid out for me upon the ward-room table, I learned from him a great deal about the ship and her skipper, one item of my acquired information being the fact that the Santa Catalina was undoubtedly the identical vessel which I had been despatched to look out for.
Had lunch on board and then Captain Scott gave us an hour or two to ourselves, for it was the day of farewell letters, everybody sitting round the ward-room table sucking pens or pencils, looking very wooden-faced and nonchalant despite the fact that we were most certainly writing to our nearest and dearest, sending through our letters an unwritten prayer that we should be spared after steadfastly performing our alloted tasks with credit to our flag and with credit to those at whose feet we yearned to lay the laurels we hoped to win.
There were marine instruments enough in that room to supply a dozen sea-captains, but if the entire lot had been loan'd me, I never could have ascertained the ship's position without asking somebody who knew it. The partition separating me from the ward-room was built after the completion of the ship, and had a way of creaking like a thousand or more squeaky boots in simultaneous action.
Having been given reason to think her husband was reduced to serving in a vessel of war, she had shipped on board a frigate bound to the Mediterranean, and had actually made a whole cruise as a ward-room boy on that station. While thus employed, she had met with two of the gentlemen present; Captain Mull and Mr. Wallace.
A missionary, on his way to the Gaboon, and two American merchant-captains, Hunt and Dayley, dined with us in the ward-room. The latter are respectable men. The missionary, Mr. Burchell, seems much depressed. He has had the fever at Cape Palmas, the effects of which still linger in his constitution; while his companion, the Rev. Mr.
Most of the bunks were in a sad state, the ship having worked so badly that the upper deck seams opened everywhere and water had literally poured into them. Looking at the fellows' faces in the ward-room at dinner that night there was no trace of anxiety, worry, or fatigue to be seen.
Beings of this kind can be useful if they will only find their appropriate sphere, which is not literature, but that circle of rough-and-tumble political life where the fine-fibred men are at a discount, where epithets find their subjects poison-proof, and the sting which would be fatal to a literary debutant only wakes the eloquence of the pachydermatous ward-room politician to a fiercer shriek of declamation.
"I hold it to be a sailor's duty to stick by his ship, reverend and dear sir." This mode of address, which was used by the "ship's gentleman" in the cant of the ward-room, as a pleasantry of an old shipmate, for the two had long sailed together in other vessels, at once announced to Harry that he saw the very chaplain for whose presence he had been so anxiously wishing.
I expect everything will be cleared away in the ward-room by this."
So that among the younger officers the query was very natural, "Who the devil is Governor of California?" One day I was on board the Independence frigate, dining with the ward-room officers, when a war-vessel was reported in the offing, which in due time was made out to be the Cyane, Captain DuPont.
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