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"Should your other sources fail, I insist that you do anything

with me or mine rather than want. Should Bill or George come to China, and my first voyage prove successful, I could give one of them a berth on board my cutter; and when I leave her, which I expect to do after two seasons, will leave the consignments with the one who chooses the business."

It will be seen in this last letter that he dwells upon the encouraging features of the undertaking, but makes no allusion to the circumstances which would have deterred most men from attempting it, and of which he must have been fully aware, even if he had not been warned of them by veteran navigators, who regarded the attempt as the wild scheme of an inexperienced youth of twenty-five.

It is proper that these circumstances should be fully stated, in order that they may be appreciated by those who are ignorant of the technical obstacles he had to encounter. The first and most important of these was the fact that, until he could weather the northern end of Formosa, his course was directly in the teeth of the northeast monsoon, which at that season blew almost incessantly, and often with great violence, and would have rendered the voyage, in a square-rigged vessel, an impossibility. This difficulty would have been removed could he have waited a month later, as he first intended; but the news that ships had sailed from Boston for the same object rendered the necessity of being early upon the coast an essential condition of success. His theory was that, in his small fore-and-aft-rigged vessel-which will run several points nearer the wind than a square righe could beat up the coast of China, keeping so near the

shore that he could run in and come to anchor when the weather was so tempestuous that he could make no headway against it. But this, of course, exposed him to such danger of shipwreck as he would have escaped on the open ocean, with plenty of sea-room; and this danger was greatly enhanced by the fact that no accurate chart of the coast could be procured, and the nearest approach to it he was able to get was a manuscript map, drawn for him by a navigator who had some familiarity with its features. For the performance of such duties as would be required, it was eminently desirable that his crew should be composed of orderly, reliable, and efficient seamen, and the risk of capture by the Indians, after arriving on the coast of America, made it necessary to carry a much larger crew than the ordinary complement of a vessel of that size. The only men that could be had, however, were of the worst class-the deserters from other vessels, who were hanging about Canton, ready to take up with any means of egress that offered. It is, perhaps, difficult, at this day, for a mariner whose experience of ocean life has been gained under the light of modern science, and with the aid of modern appliances and inventions, to appreciate the difficulty, danger, and hardship of such a voyage, or the courage and determined will required for its successful execution. He sailed from Canton on the 10th of January, 1799, passing Macão at four P.M. on the same day, and keeping a long distance from the shipping, lest some of his men might be reclaimed by the ships from which they had deserted.

I do not propose to repeat the details of the voyage,

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which has been so well told in his "Narrative." His journal of each day's experience is in my possession, and also a manuscript of twenty-eight pages of letter-sheet, written at sea, when on his return, for the entertainment of his father, giving a full account of all his experiences; and the performance of the voyage itself is scarcely less wonderful than the fact that, under all thơ difficulties of the situation, both journal and manuscript are executed in a hand like copper-plate, such as not one man in a thousand could equal with every appliance for skilful penmanship. Yet this was long before the invention of metallic pens, and, to his latest day, my father disdained their use, and adhered to the goosequill. A few extracts from these manuscripts, written at the time, and without a thought of their ever being made public, will serve to show some of the characteristics which, in reality, formed the groundwork of his success. Thus, in the account of the voyage written for his father's amusement, the opening passage shows clearly how fully he was aware of the difficulties he had to encounter, and how carefully he had considered his means of coping with them:

"I think you were informed, by one of my last letters from China, of my determination to sail from thence earlier than I at first intended, in consequence of hearing of several vessels fitting out for a similar voyage from America; and to this I am indebted for the success of my voyage, as I shall show you in course. It was, however, contrary to the advice of my best friends, and the most experienced navigators in those seas, some of whom took considerable pains to dissuade me from it by telling me that, as it was at the height of the northeast monsoon, there would be a continual rapid current against me, and frequent gales of wind; that I might beat a

month without gaining any to windward, and should finally return —if at all—with my sails and rigging torn to pieces, to refit. I was, as you will imagine, not pleased with such gloomy prospects, but concluded that, if I was to meet ruin, it might as well be by being torn to pieces on the China coast as to arrive on the coast of America after the object of my voyage had been secured by other vessels. I was the more encouraged to make the trial as I could not learn that it had ever been attempted at the same season of the year by any European; therefore my advisers could not be certain of its impracticability. I knew, also, that they supposed I should keep at— what is generally called-a prudent distance from the shore, and did not conceive that any man would beat up, for the most part, within hail of an extensive, dangerous coast, not only without having any experience along it, but with no other guide than an imperfect manuscript chart.

"The handiness of my vessel and her easy draught of water led me to do this, in the expectation that I should meet with regular tides, and that, when they were against me, I should often be able to anchor, and on this I principally depended for the accomplishment of this arduous task. On the 10th January, 1799, having all hands on board, in number twenty-one persons, consisting-except two Americans of English, Irish, Swedes, and French, but principally the first, who were runaways from the men-of-war and Indiamen, and two from a Botany Bay ship, who had made their escape-for we were obliged to take such as we could get-served to complete a list of as accomplished villains as ever disgraced any country. I weighed anchor from Anson's Bay at eight A.M., with a fresh breeze from the northeast, and cloudy, unpleasant weather, passing Macao Roads at four P.M. at a considerable distance, fearing to go within gunshot of the shipping, lest they should bring us to and take our men out, many of whom belonged to these very ships."

Three weeks of incessant labor, hardship, and exposure proved that the terrors of the voyage had not been exaggerated. Beating up against the wind whenever a favorable tide or a temporary diminution in its violence enabled them to do so, yet often finding themselves, at

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night, abreast, and sometimes leagues to leeward of, the point they had left in the morning; running in to anchor at night at any harbor they could make, and availing themselves, in doing so, of the information they could get from the fishermen or proprietors of the junks, of which they often found large fleets at anchor in the harbors; several times having hair-breadth escapes from sunken rocks, on which they touched or passed close by in ignorance, and so continually wet through that the labor of carrying clothes up into the rigging to dry was unremitting, caused such suffering and depression in the crew as finally to break out in open mutiny.

A single extract will serve as a sample of the experiences so often repeated that even the perusal of them in the daily journal becomes depressing from its painful monotony :

"On the morning of the 21st we weighed anchor, and put out in company with several junks, and till the 24th had no other than a head wind, sometimes blowing very fresh, at others moderate. In the former case, when we could gain nothing by beating, we generally found a smooth place in which to anchor, and in the latter were always forced to anchor when the tide made against us. In the morning of the 24th we had a light breeze from southwest, which, soon after increasing, blew a good whole-sail breeze all day, and I was flattering myself it would carry us round the north end of Formosa, when the most difficult part of the passage would have been completed; but in this I was grievously disappointed, for, at eight P.M., the wind shifted, in a squall, to its old quarter, the northeast, and blew very hard. Till the night of the 26th we continued plying to windward near the shore, when, it being very dark, we could not gain an anchorage, and therefore stood out to sea till seven o'clock the next morning, and then tacked to stand in again. At