Jack in the Forecastle | Page 4

sheep-pens, sufficiently spacious to furnish with comfortable
quarters some sixty or seventy sheep; and on the pens, ranged along in
beautiful confusion, was an imposing display of hen-coops and
turkey-coops, the interstices being ingeniously filled with bundles of
hay and chunks of firewood. The quarter-deck was "lumbered up" with
hogsheads of water, and casks of oats and barley, and hen-coops
without number.
With such a deck-load, not an unusually large one in those days, the
leading trucks attached to the fore-rigging were about half way between
the main deck and the foretop. It was a work of difficulty and danger to
descend from the deck-load to the forecastle; but to reach the foretop
required only a hop, skip, and a jump. The locomotive qualities of this
craft, misnamed the Dolphin, were little superior to those of a well
constructed raft; and with a fresh breeze on the quarter, in spite of the
skill of the best helmsman, her wake was as crooked as that of the

"wounded snake," referred to by the poet, which "dragged its slow
length along."
It was in the early part of July, in the year 1809, that the brig Dolphin
left Portsmouth, bound on a voyage to Dutch Guiana, which at that
time, in consequence of the malignant fevers that prevailed on the coast,
was not inaptly termed "the grave of American seamen." The crew
consisted of the captain and mate, five sailors, a green hand to act as
cook, and a cabin boy. There was also a passenger on board, a young
man named Chadwick, who had been residing in Portsmouth, and was
going to Demarara, in the hope which fortunately for him was not
realized of establishing himself in a mercantile house.
The forecastle being, for obvious reasons, untenable during the outward
passage, these ten individuals, when below deck, were stowed away in
the cabin and steerage, amid boxes, bales, chests, barrels, and water
casks, in a manner somewhat miscellaneous, and not the most
commodious or comfortable. Indeed, for several days after we left port,
the usual and almost only access to the cabin was by the skylight; and
those who made the cabin their home, were obliged to crawl on all
fours over the heterogeneous mass of materials with which it was
crowded, in order to reach their berths!
The owners of the brig must have calculated largely on favorable
weather during the passage; for had we experienced a gale on the coast,
or fallen in with the tail-end of a hurricane in the tropics, the whole
deck-load would have been swept away, and the lives of the ship's
company placed in imminent peril. The weather, however, proved
remarkably mild, and the many inconveniences to which the crew were
subjected were borne with exemplary patience, and sometimes even
regarded as a capital joke.
We passed the Whale's Back at the mouth of the Piscataqua, and the
Isles of Shoals loomed up through the hazy atmosphere; and although
the wind was light, and the sea apparently smooth, the brig began to
have a motion an awkward, uneasy motion for which I could not
account, and which, to my great annoyance, continued to increase as
we left the land. I staggered as I crossed the quarter-deck, and soon
after we cleared the harbor, came near pitching overboard from the
platform covering the sheep-pens. My head was strangely confused,
and a dizziness seized me, which I in vain struggled to shake off. My

spirits, so gay and buoyant as we sailed down the harbor, sunk to zero.
At length I could not resist the conviction that I was assailed with
symptoms of seasickness, a malady which I had always held in
contempt, believing it to exist more in imagination than in fact, and
which I was determined to resist, as unsailor-like and unmanly. Other
symptoms of a less equivocal description, soon placed the character of
my illness beyond a doubt. My woe-begone looks must have betrayed
my feelings, for one of the men told me, with a quizzical leer, that old
Neptune always exacted toll in advance from a green hand for his
passage over the waters.
Mr. Thompson, who seemed to pity my miserable condition, gravely
assured me that exercise was a capital thing as a preventive or cure for
seasickness, and advised me to try the pump. I followed his advice: a
few strokes brought up the bilge water, than which nothing at that time
could have been more insufferably nauseous! I left the pump in disgust,
and retiring to the after part of the quarter-deck, threw myself down on
a coil of rope, unable longer to struggle with my fate. There I remained
unnoticed and uncared for for several hours, when, the wind having
changed, the rope which formed my bed, and proved to