As His Excitement Passed Off, Headache, Languor, Fever,
Set In, - The Deadly Coast-Fever, Contracted From The Water And
Night-Dews On Shore And His Maddened Temper.
He ordered the ship
to Penang, and never saw the deck again.
He died on the passage,
and was buried at sea. Mr. Channing, who took care of him in his
sickness and delirium, caught the fever from him, but, as we
gratefully remember, did not die until the ship made port, and he was
under the kindly roof of a hospitable family in Penang. The chief
mate, also, took the fever, and the second mate and crew deserted;
and although the chief mate recovered and took the ship to Europe
and home, the voyage was a melancholy disaster. In a tour I made
round the world in 1859-1860, of which my revisit to California was
the beginning, I went to Penang. In that fairy-like scene of sea
and sky and shore, as beautiful as material earth can be, with its
fruits and flowers of a perpetual summer, - somewhere in which still
lurks the deadly fever, - I found the tomb of my kinsman, classmate,
and friend. Standing beside his grave, I tried not to think that
his life had been sacrificed to the faults and violence of another;
I tried not to think too hardly of that other, who at least had
suffered in death.
The dear old Pilgrim herself! She was sold, at the end of this
voyage, to a merchant in New Hampshire, who employed her on short
voyages, and, after a few years, I read of her total loss at sea,
by fire, off the coast of North Carolina.
Enter page number
PreviousNext
Page 610 of 618
Words from 167719 to 167999
of 170236
