SIX MONTHS

IN

THE FEDERAL

STATES.

OUT AT SEA.

It was not my purpose on going to America to write a book of travels. I did not intend, in other words, to republish my own diary. Everybody judges of the public by himself, and I own that, to me, the perusal of any other person's diary is singularly uninteresting. In an unknown country, the daily record of the traveller's adventures may possess a real value. On a journey such as mine it was not probable that a traveller would meet with any greater personal adventures than rough quarters, bad inns, and stormy weather. It would be a matter of little interest to the public, or, indeed, to myself, to record whether on such a night, in such a month, I slept at Philadelphia or at Baltimore, and whether I found the Girard House better

B

A fellow-pas

than the Continental, or vice versa. senger, on board the good ship Africa, kept a careful log of the vessel's progress, and kindly presented me with a copy. I always wonder, when I think of it, what conceivable satisfaction he expected to derive hereafter by the knowledge that, on one day during that weary, dreary blank which a sea voyage forms in human life, we were in longitude 42° 15', and the next in longitude 46° 38'. There is no disputing about tastes; but, as far as my experience goes, the taste for statistical information is not a common one. The great majority of mankind (and, I confess, I agree with them) are perfectly content to travel by railroad without knowing, or caring to know, how many revolutions the wheels make per minute, and how many tons of coal are consumed at a given speed. It is for Gallios on such matters that I write.

Of my voyage, therefore, I shall say but little. It was in the depth of winter, immediately after the settlement of the Trent affair, that I sailed for the New World. What with the storms at sea and the storms in the political ocean, our complement of passengers was of the scantiest; and yet, scanty as it was, it formed a strange epitome of the new country we were hurrying to. Most of us were men who had seen something of the world. We had amongst us an ex-colonial governor; the son of an English earl, now a member of the Canadian parliament; a quondam man about town, settled in

the Far West, to whom the prairie and Pall Mall were alike familiar; a Frenchman, whose home was in New York, but whose heart lay in Paris; a Swiss officer of distinction; a Scotch lawyer, who had married in America; a number of New York and Boston dry-goods men; and a young Englishman, travelling for pleasure, to visit his relatives in the States. With the exception of myself, perhaps, every one of us had his fortunes more or less connected with both hemispheres.

Politics were dangerous subjects of conversation; and we avoided them as much as possible. We had strong pro-Union New Englanders amongst us, Government agents, Southern secessionists, and an unhappy bagman, who (I believe entirely on the strength of a somewhat forbidding cast of features) was regarded as a spy. The promotion, therefore, of mutual good fellowship put a check on political discussions; and even without this, we were not intellectually equal to them. In fact, what struck me most amongst the novelties of a long sea voyage, was the extraordinary lassitude of mind produced by it. It is a mystery to me still how we ate so much, slept so long, and did so little. We tried very hard, at times, to amuse ourselves, and failed lamentably. We told the same stock stories, heard the same stock jokes, and played at the same stock games. Being at sea, we did as sea-travellers do. We were first absurdly stiff, then unreasonably familiar, then personally offensive to each other, and finally

quarrelsome. We had hardly any ladies amongst us; but we talked as much gossip, and spread as much scandal about one another, as if we had been a crew of old maids. In short, we were dull-drearily dull.

Our passage was, I suppose, much as other passages are of the water, watery. We had the regular experiences. We had a storm, and got blocked amongst the ice, and were enveloped in a fog off the banks of Newfoundland. We were followed by the sea-gulls from the Mersey to the Narrows; sighted a ship or two; saw, or fancied we saw, an iceberg; and were visited by a sparrow in the middle of the Atlantic. These are the sole outward incidents of our voyage I can call to mind. Of the remarks made by any of us during that period of intellectual trance, there is but one, I think, worth recalling, less for its intrinsic value, than as a word of recollection to my fellow-passengers, in case any of them should come across this book of mine. It was during the height of our one great storm. The waves were rolling, foaming, surging round us, as only Atlantic waves can do; the ship staggered, careened, and reeled, as wave after wave came thundering on her; the wind roared howling round us; and sea and sky seemed fused together in one watery mist of foam and spray. At last, a monster wave struck us dead upon the larboard side (I hope that is the correct nautical term), broke the stout beams of the deck-cabin as though they had been

tinder, carried afloat chairs and tables, and flooded the berths below with a sea of water. A small party were playing faro at the time, clinging to the table with one hand, and clutching their cards with the other, when the wave washed both players and tables away to the end of the cabin. One of them, a friend of mine, sprung up with his cards in his hands, and staggering across the cabin, groaned, amidst the howling of the tempest and the shrieks of the female passengers, "I wish Columbus had been crucified!" That such a saying should have been the brightest I can remember on our voyage, will give the reader a fair impression of the mental imbecility to which sea sickness and dulness had reduced us.

With this much of mention, I am content to let my outward voyage float out of memory. I do not like to contemplate the possibility of a state of existence in which it will hereafter be a pleasure to remember it.