SPECTATOR'S LIBRARY.

NAVTICAL AMENTURE,

Two Years Before the Mast. A Personal Narrative of Life at Sea. . Meson.

Brortaseirr,

The Life of Beethoven ; including Correspondence with his Friends. &c. Edi•ed by Iguana Moseheles. Esq. lu 2 vols. Wpm:. Marturseruggs,

A Treatise ou the Copyright of Designs in Printed Fabrics; whh Considerations on the necessity of its Extension : and copious Notices of the stale of Calico-print- ing in Belgium, Germany, andthe States of the Prussian Commercial League. By

I. Emerson Teuneut, Esq , M.P Smith and Elder. &mimes,

The East India Year-Book for 1841. (Under the Superintendence of the British

India Society.) Allen and Co.

TWO YEARS BEFORE THE MAST.

Tins is a reprint of a new American work, which Mr. Moxori has been induced to undertake " from the favourable opinion entertained of it by officers of old standing in the British Navy, who were persuaded that an extended circulation of it might have wholsome effects among seamen in general and the many who regard their welfare." Of its nautical value we are not competent to judge, but its literary merits are great. Two Years Before the Mast is a real, natural, and unaffected narra- tive of daily life at sea and nautical character ; combining in the far- away character of its incidents and the Defoe-like strength of its descriptions, the interest of fiction with the sober accuracy of positive fact. It also brings before the reader, and probably for the first time, the characters and position of " common sailors," and the terrific hardships they undergo. Notwithstanding the number of nautical novels, or books descriptive of a sea life, which have appeared of late years, they have all been written, as this author truly observes, by passengers or officers ; and " it must be plain to every one, that a naval officer, who goes to sea as a gentleman, with his gloves on,' (as the phrase is,) and who associates only with his fellow-officers, and hardly speaks to a sailor except through a boatswain's mate, must take a very different view of the whole matter from that which would be taken by the common sailor."

The author of Two Years Before the Mast was a student of Harvard College ; who, having weakened his eyes by over-appli- cation, determined to throw aside " books and study," and take a voyage for two or three years by way of resting them, since medicine had been found of no avail. In Europe such a plan would have appeared the scheme of a ne'er-do-well, anxious to get away from confinement and commence his downward career ; or some sort of quiet arrangement would have been made, by which a " respectable " person taking such a freak in his head should have had his place made easy till he thought fit to quit it. But in America, as MARRYAT tells us, the mercantile marine is entered by young men of respectability as a preparatory training for the rank of officer ; and the democratic feeling of the people would not probably bear a distinction that would seem but right in Europe. But be this as it may, the author's character and position have given him peculiar advantages. Toiling, messing, and mixing with foremast-men, he endured their labours and privations, appreciated their character, and entered into their feelings, whilst he possesses a comprehension and power of ex- pression which it would be vain to expect from a common sailor. He has also touches of poetical feeling, which, introduced as they are sparingly and aptly, impart variety and' elevation to his book, without giving it a forced air.

The vessel R. H. D. embarked in, (for he conceals his name,) was bound on a voyage along the coast of California to collect a cargo of hides from the different depots which are established there. His voyage only embraces two passages round Cape Horn, a transient touch at Juan Fernandez, and a year's coasting. His observations on land have no very extensive range ; for, in the first place, there Was not much to observe ; and in the second, he was chiefly occupied in hard work, except a pretty long spell at hide-dressing, and a few "liberty Sundays." His observations, however, are entertaining, and apparently exact, upon the subjects than fell in his way ; and a good idea of the ports of California, their native inhabitants and foreign settlers, will be gained from the pages of Two Years Before the Mast.

The peculiar value of the book, however, consists in its picture of the life of the common sailor, and the general economy of a ship. From its pages the landsman may learn the gradation of ranks, the division of time, the use and locality of parts of the vessel, and the various occupations on ship-board. He will also gather a very distinct idea of the curious characters of all nations, all natures, and, it would seem, pretty many ranks of society, that are found collected before the mast in one common level of necessity. The prejudices and feelings of the sailor will also be brought before him : but the most distinct and impressive features will be his hard work, hard living, and broken rest, and the misery which a brute or a tyrant of a captain may inflict upon his crew individually or collectively. These things are done, too, so naturally and quietly— the whole is so obviously a transcript from actual life—that the reader seems to realize the whole as readily as if he were himself familiar with it. Two Years Before the Mast is not only valuable as a book of travels and a personal narrative, but as bringing before the world a new page of human life. We pass over the labour, and the exposure to every climate in rapid succession, which the sailor undergoes—far more severe than any thing the slave is exposed to—because it must be impressed by a repetition of daily details. The hardship admits of a better coup-arceil. Here is a winter's night in the Southern Ocean, sur- rounded by ice-islands.

" Here we were, nearly seven hundred miles to the westward of the Cape, [Horn,] with a gale dead from the eastward, and the weather so thick that we could not see the ice with which we were surrounded until it was directly under our bows. At fonrp. m. (it was then quite dark) all hands were called, and sent aloft in a violent squall of hail and rain to take in sail. We had now all got on our ' Cape Horn rig'—thick boots, south-western coming done over our necks and ears, thick trousers and jackets, and some with oil-cloth suits over all. Mittens, too, we wore on deck ; but it would not do to go aloft with them on, for it was impossible to work with them, and being wet and stiff, they might let a man slip overboard, for all the hold he could get upon a rope; so we were obliged to work with bare hands, which, as well as our faces, were often cut with the hailstones, which fell thick and large. Our ship was now all cased with ice—hull, spars, and standing rigging, and the running rigging so stiff that we could hardly bend it so as to belay it, or still worse, take a knot with it ; and the sails nearly as stiff as sheet non. One at a time (for it was long piece of work, and required ninny hands) we furled the courses, mizen top-sail, and fore top-mast stay-sail, and close-reefed the fore and main top-sails, and hove the ship to under the fore, with the main hauled up by the clewlines and buntlines, and ready to be sheeted home if we found it neces- sary to make sail to get to windward of an island. A regular look-out was then set, and kept by each watch in turn, until the morning. It was a tedious and anxious night : it blew hard the whole time, and there was an almost constant driving of either rain, hail, or snow. In addition to this, it was ' as thick as muck,' and the ice was all about us. The captain was on deck nearly the whole night, and kept the cook in the galley, with a roaring fire, to make coffee for him, which he took every few hours, and once or twice gave a little to his officers ; but not a drop of any thing was there for the crew. The captain, who sleeps all the daytime, and comes and goes at night as he chooses, can have his brandy-and-water in the cabin, and his hot coffee at the galley ; while Jack, who has to stand through every thing, and work in wet and cold, can have nothing to wet his lips or warm his stomach. This was a tem- perance ship '; and, like too many such ships, the temperance was all in the forecastle."

The iceberg is a favourite subject with voyagers in high Northern and Southern latitudes, but this is the best picture we remember to have seen—or motion has given it more life and character.

A GIGANTIC ICEBERG.

At twelve o'clock we went below; and had just got through dinner, when the cook put his bead down the scuttle and told us to come on deck and see the finest sight that we had ever seen. " 'Where away, cook? " asked the first man who was up. "On the larboard bow." And there lay floating in the ocean several miles off, an immense irregular mass, its top and points covered with snow, and its centre of a deep indigo colour. This was an iceberg, and of the largest size, as one of our men said, who had been in the Northern Ocean. As far as the eye could reach, the sea in every direction was of a deep blue colour, the waves running high and fresh, and sparkling in the light ; and in the midst lay this immense mountain-island, its cavities and vallies thrown into deep, shade, and its points and pinnacles glittering in the sun. All hands were soon on deck, looking at it and admiring in various ways its beauty and grandeur. But no description can give any idea of the strangeness, splendour, and, really, the sublimity of the sight. Its great size—for it must have been from two to three miles in circumference and several hundred feet& height ; its slow motion, as its base rose and sank in the water, and its high points nodded against the clouds; the dashing of the waves upon it, which, breaking high with foam, lined its base with a white crust ; and the thundering sound of the cracking of the mass, and the breaking and tumbling down of huge pieces; together with its nearness and approach, which added a slight element of fear,—all combined to give to it the character of true sublimity. The main body of the mass was, as I have said, of an indigo colour, its base crusted with frozen foam ; and as it grew thin and transparent toward the edges and top, its colour shaded off from a deep blue to the whiteness of snow. It seemed to be drifting slowly towarth the north, so that we kept away and avoided it. It was in sight all the afternoon ; and when we got to leeward of it, the wind died away, so that we lay-to quite near it for a greater part of the night. Unfortunately, there was no moon ; but it was a clear night, and we could plainly mark the long regular heaving of the stupendous mass as its edges moved slowly against the stars. Several times in our watch loud cracks were beard, which sounded as though they must have run through the whole length of the iceberg, and several pieces fell down with a thundering crash, plunging heavily into the sea. Toward morning a stropg breeze sprang up, and we filled away and left it astern, and at daylight it out of sight. • • * No pencil has ever yet given any thing like the true effect of an iceberg. In a picture, they are huge, uncouth masses, stuck in the sea ; while their chief beauty and grandeur—their slow, stately motion, the whirling of the snow about their summits, and the fearful groaning and cracking of their parts—the picture cannot give. This is the large iceberg; while the small and distant islands, floating on the smooth sea in the lighkof a clear day, look like little floating fairy isles of sapphire.

A point which will hardly fail to strike any one in reading this volume, is the ready apprehension and sound judgment of men whose education is narrow or none, whose habits are coarse, and whose experience is limited and of the worst kind. Yet these men form a true estimate of their officers—truer, perhaps, than those who mix with them ; pass a sound judgment upon the general ma- nagement of the vessel ; and are not unaffected, even the roughest of them, by scenes of natural beauty. This, it may be said, is more or less in the way of their business ; but they can relish, if they can- not appreciate, works of literature, when there is a story.

READING WOODSTOCK.

The next day, from fear that something might happen, orders were given for no one to leave the ship, and, as the decks were lumbered up with every thing, we could not wash them down, so we had nothing to do all day long Un- fortunately, our books were where we could not get at them, and we were turning about for something to do, when one man recollected a book he had left in the galley. He went after it, and it proved to be Woodstock. This was a great windfall, and as all could not read it at once, I, being the scholar of the company, was appointed reader. I got a knot of six or eight about me, and no one could have bad a more attentive audience. Some laughed at the " scholars," and went over the other side of the forecastle, to work, and spin their yarns; but I carried the day, and had the cream of the crew for my hearers. Many of the reflections, and the political parts, I omitted, but all the narrative they were delighted with ; especially the descriptions of the Puritans, and the sermons and harangues of the Roundhead soldiers. The gallantry oiCharles, Dr. Batcliffe's plots, the knavery of " trusty Tompkins,"—in fact, every part seemed to chain their attention. Many things. which, while I was reading, I bad a misgiving about, thinking them above their capacity, I was surprised to find them enter into completely. I read nearly. all day, until sundown ; when, as soon as supper was over, as I had nearly finished, they got a light from the galley ; and by skipping what

was less interesting, I carried them through to the marriage of Evened, and the restoration of Charles the Second, before eight o'clock.

The following account of their songs, though ludicrous to us, yet shows a tendency to prefer the mental to the mere animal, which is probably innate in most men. The execution of the old tar was absurd, but perhaps he might have growled out a real emotion much in the same way.

FORECASTLE SONGS.

Among her crew were two English man-of-war's-men ; so that, of course, we soon had music. They sang in the true sailor's style ; and the rest of the crew, which was a remarkably musical one, joined in the choruses. They had many of the latest sailor songs, which had not yet got about among our merchant- men, and which they were very choice of. They began soon after we came on board, and kept it up until after two bells, when the second mate came forward and called, " The Alert's away !" Battle-songs, drinking-songs, boat-songs, love-songs, and every thing else, they seemed to have a complete assortment of; and I was glad to find that "All in the Downs," "Poor Tom Bowline," " The Bay of Biscay," " List,' ye landsmen," and all those classical songs of the sea, still held their places. In addition to these, they bad picked up at the theatres and other places a few songs of a little more genteel cast, which they were very proud of; and I shall never forget bearing an old salt, who had broken his voice by hard drinking on shore and bellowing from the mast-head in a hundred north-westers, with all manner of ungovernable trills and quavers— in the high notes breaking into a rough falsetto, and in the low ones growling along like the dying away of the boatswain's " all hands ahoy ! down the hatchway, singing " Oh, no, we never mention her."

" Perhaps. like me. she struggles with Each feeling of regret; But if she toted as I hate loved, She never can forget!"

The last line, being the conclusion, he roared out at the top of his voice, breaking each word up into half-a-dozen syllables. This was very popular; and Jack was called upon every night to give them his " sentimental song." No one called for it more loudly than I ; for the complete absurdity of the execution, and the sailors' perfect satisfaction in it, were ludicrous beyond

measure.

A curious feature in the volume is the number of characters it contains. In this respect we know of nothing to compare with it excepting FRANKLIN'S Memoirs : and the odd mixture of persons found in the American colonies a hundred years ago, was not greater than is now met with in the few towns on the Western coast of North America, or among the crews of the different vessels that navigate her Pacific—Negroes, Polynesians, half- breeds, Spanish Creole‘ "proud of pedigree but poor of purse," speculating Yankees, commercial Englishmen, and sailors from every European nation. Some were of roAXot, but others broken- down gentlemen, with manners superior to their minds, but minds superior to their station, or men of great natural abilities and ar- dour, kept back in the race of life by some defects of temper or of morals. To illustrate these points in detail would require much space ; but we may take a congress of nations, that met at a hide- drying station—a collection of wooden barns in a convenient bay, where the skins collected from various places might be prepared for their long voyage. "The greater part of the crews of the vessels came ashore every evening, and we passed the time in going about from one house to another, and listening to all manner of languages. The Spanish was the common ground upon which we all met ; for every one knew more or less of that. We had now, out of forty or fifty, representatives from almost every nation under the sun; two Englishmen, three Yankees, two Scotchmen, two Welshmen, one Irish- man, three Frenchmen, (two of whom were Normans and the third from Gascony,) one Dutchman, one Austrian, two or three Spaniards (from old Spain,) half-a-dozen Spanish Americana and half-breeds, two native Indians from Chili and the island of Chiloe, one Negro, one Mulatto, about twenty Italians from all parts of Italy, as many more Sandwich Islanders, one Otaheitan, and one Kanaka from the Marquesas Islands.

" The night before the vessels were ready to sail, all the Europeans united and had an entertainment at the Rosa's hide-house, and we had songs of every nation and tongue. A German gave us Och ! mein lieber Augustin !" the three Frenchmen roared through the Marseilles hymn ; the English and Scotchmen gave us Rule Britannia' and Whall be King but Charlie ?' the Italians and Spaniards screamed through some national affairs, for which I was none the wiser ; and we three Yankees made an attempt at the Star- spangled Banner.' After these national tributes had been paid, the Austrian gave us a very pretty little love-song; and the Frenchmen sang a spirited thing called Sentinelle ! 0 prenez garde it vous !' and then followed the melange which might have been expected. When I left them, the aquadiente and annisou was pretty well in their heads, and they were all singing and talking at once, and their peculiar national oaths were getting as plenty as pronouns."

The utter incapacity of the Spanish South American character for self-advancement, or even, it would appear, for improvement by amalgamating with foreign stocks, is slightly but strikingly indi- cated in the volume before us. Possessing one of the finest cli- mates, a soil very fertile in parts and productive nearly through- out, California is rather retrograding than advancing. The rule of the new Republicans is in fact a great deal worse than that of the old Prisidios or heads of missions ; for the priests were regular and mild, the new authorities are arbitrary and ex- acting. Steam-navigation to the Pacific, instead of improving, seems more likely to swamp them altogether ; and sooner or later California will follow the fate of Texas. Already something like it has begun, and that in pure self-defence.

AN =PERM! IN IEFERIO.

As for justice, they know no law but will and fear. A Yankee, who had been naturalized and become a Catholic, and had married in the country, was sitting in his house at the Pueblo de los Angelos with his wife and children, when a Spaniard with whom he had had a difficulty entered the house and stabbed him to the heart, before them all The murderer was seized by some Yankees who had settled there, and kept in confinement until a statement of the whole affair could be sent to the Governor-General. He refused to do any thing about it : and the countrymen of the murdered man, seeing no pros- pect of justice being administered, made known that if nothing was done they should try the man themselves. It chanced that at this time there was a cora- pany of forty trappers and hunters from Kentucky, with their rifles, who had made their head-quarters at the Pueblo; and these, togetherwith the Americans and Englishmen in the place, who were between twenty and thirty in number, took possession of the town, and, waiting a reasonable time, proceeded to try the man according to the forms in their own country. A judge and jury were ap- pointed ; and he was tried, convicted, sentenced to be shot, and carried out be- fore the town with his eyes blindfolded_ The names of all the men were then put into a hat, and each man pledging himself to perform his duty, twelve names were drawn out, and the men took their stations with their rifles, and firing at the word, laid him dead. He was decently buried, and the place was restored quietly to the proper authorities. A General with titles enough for an hidalgo was at San Gabriel, and issued a proclamation as long as the fore- top-bowline, threatening destruction to the rebels, but never stirred from his fort ; for forty Kentucky hunters, with their rifles, were a match for a whole regiment of hungry, drawling, lazy half-breeds. This affair happened while we were at San Pedro, (the port of Pueblo,) and we had all the particulars directly from those who were on the spot. A few months afterwards, another man, whom we had often seen in San Diego, murdered a man and his wife on the high-road between the Pueblo and an Louis Rey ;. but the foreigners not feeling themselves called upon to act in this case, the parties being all natives, nothing was done about it ; and I frequently afterwards saw the murderer in San Diego, where he was living with his wife and family.

The closing chapter is devoted to a review of the various plans that have been broached in America for ameliorating the condition of the common sailor ; but the conclusion to which the author comes is, that nothing can be done directly. Having seen the abominable tyranny which a shipmaster may exercise, he yet doubts whether his powers should be restricted by law, in consequence of the responsibility thrown upon him, and the necessity hourly arising for implicit obedience: he would not even abolish the power of flogging, subject as the master now is to an action if he exercises it without necessity. The only mode of benefiting the sailor is to improve his character ; by which means the officers will treat him with more respect, and be compelled to improve themselves.