n 1797, when twenty-three years
old, he was master of the bark Enterprise bound from Salem to Mocha for
coffee. The voyage was abandoned at Havre and he sent the mate home
with the ship, deciding to remain abroad and gamble for himself with the
chances of the sea. In France he bought on credit a "cutter-sloop"
of forty-three tons, no larger than the yachts whose owners think it
venturesome to take them off soundings in summer cruises. In this little
box of a craft he planned to carry a cargo of merchandise to the Cape of
Good Hope and thence to Mauritius.

His crew included two men, a black cook, and a brace of boys who were
hastily shipped at Havre. "Fortunately they were all so much in debt
as not to want any time to spend their advance, but were ready at the
instant, and with this motley crew, (who, for aught I knew, were robbers
or pirates) I put to sea." The only sailor of the lot was a Nantucket
lad who was made mate and had to be taught the rudiments of navigation
while at sea. Of the others he had this to say, in his lighthearted
manner:

"The first of my fore-mast hands is a great, surly, crabbed, raw-boned,
ignorant Prussian who is so timid aloft that the mate has frequently
been obliged to do his duty there. I believe him to be more of a
soldier than a sailor, though he has often assured me that he has been
a boatswain's mate of a Dutch Indiaman, which I do not believe as he
hardly knows how to put two ends of a rope together.... My cook... a
good-natured negro and a tolerable cook, so unused to a vessel that in
the smoothest weather he cannot walk fore and aft without holding onto
something with both hands. This fear proceeds from the fact that he is
so tall and slim that if he should get a cant it might be fatal to
him. I did not think America could furnish such a specimen of the negro
race... nor did I ever see such a simpleton. It is impossible to teach
him anything and... he can hardly tell the main-halliards from the
mainstay.

"Next is an English boy of seventeen years old, who from having lately
had the small-pox is feeble and almost blind, a miserable object,
but pity for his misfortunes induces me to make his duty as easy as
possible. Finally I have a little ugly French boy, the very image of a
baboon, who from having served for some time on different privateers has
all the tricks of a veteran man-of-war's man, though only thirteen years
old, and by having been in an English prison, has learned e