Mr. Richard Brown, of Marblehead, our chief mate in the Alert, commanded many of our noblest ships in the European trade, a general favorite. A few years ago, while stepping on board his ship from the wharf, he fell from the plank into the hold and was killed. If he did not actually die at sea, at least he died as a sailor—he died on board ship.
Our second mate, Evans, no one liked or cared for, and I know nothing of him, except that I once saw him in court, on trial for some alleged petty tyranny towards his men—still a subaltern officer.
The third mate, Mr. Hatch, a nephew of one of the owners, though only a lad on board the ship, went out chief mate the next voyage, and rose soon to command some of the finest clippers in the California and India trade, under the new order of things—a man of character, good judgment, and no little cultivation.
Of the other men before the mast in the Alert, I know nothing of peculiar interest. When visiting, with a party of ladies and gentlemen, one of our largest line-of-battle ships, we were escorted about the decks by a midshipman, who was explaining various matters on board, when one of the party came to me and told me that there was an old sailor there with a whistle round his neck, who looked at me and said of the officer, “He can’t show him anything aboard a ship.” I found him out, and, looking into his sunburnt face, covered with hair, and his little eyes drawn up into the smallest passages for light—like a man who had peered into hundreds of northeasters—there was old “Sails” of the Alert, clothed in all the honors of boatswain’s mate. We stood aside, out of the cun of the officers, and had a good talk over old times. I remember the contempt with which he turned on his heel to conceal his face, when the midshipman (who was a grown youth) could not tell the ladies the length of a fathom, and said it depended on circumstances. Notwithstanding his advice and consolation to “Chips,” in the steerage of the Alert, and his story of his runaway wife and the flag-bottomed chairs (see here), he confessed to me that he had tried marriage again, and had a little tenement just outside the gate of the yard.
Harry Bennett, the man who had the palsy, and was unfeelingly left on shore when the Alert sailed, came home in the Pilgrim, and I had the pleasure of helping to get him into the Massachusetts General Hospital. When he had been there about a week, I went to see him in his ward, and asked him how he got along. “Oh! first-rate usage, sir; not a hand’s turn to do, and all your grub brought to you, sir.” This is a sailor’s paradise—not a hand’s turn to do, and all your grub brought to you. But an earthly paradise may pall. Bennett got tired of indoors and stillness, and was soon out again, and set up a stall, covered with canvas, at the end of one of the bridges, where he could see all the passersby, and turn a penny by cakes and ale. The stall in time disappeared, and I could learn nothing of his last end, if it has come.
Of the lads who, beside myself, composed the gig’s crew, I know something of all but one. Our bright-eyed, quick-witted little cockswain, from the Boston public schools, Harry May, or Harry Bluff, as he was called, with all his songs and gibes, went the road to ruin as fast as the usual means could carry him. Nat, the “Bucket-maker,” grave and sober, left the seas, and, I believe, is a hack-driver in his native town, although I have not had the luck to see him since the Alert hauled into her berth at the North End.
One cold winter evening, a pull at the bell, and a woman in distress wished to see me. Her poor son George—George Somerby—“you remember him, sir; he was a boy in the Alert; he always
