On the afternoon of the 15th of December, all hands being on board, with coal dust, and wine for distinguished functionaries in the U.S. on our decks, an orange and banana smell over the ship, and six little Madeira bullocks, who, upon being hoisted in by the horns, no sooner reached the decks, than they indulged in a series of cavortings, to the no small amusement of the old shell-back denizens of the forecastle, we lifted anchor, and steamed away from Funchal, to the south. At nightfall Madeira’s lines of green, and basalt, and red soil, were lost to view.

We were now entering on the longest run we anticipated making during the cruise. On the second morning out at an early hour we made Palma, one of the westernmost of the Canary islands. When the sun came up from behind it, defining its sharp peaks and irradiating the whole outline of the island, I had the happy consciousness that it fully compensated me for the rupture of my matinal slumbers, necessary to get a glimpse of it. The celebrated peak of Teneriffe was wrapped in cloud when we passed, and I did not see it; though others with “optics sharp,” at one time, said they discerned it in the extreme distance. We subsequently passed in sight of the Cape de Verde islands. During the day we ran into what is termed the incipient northeast trades, and as our coal was not deemed sufficient for the run before us, the engines were stopped, twenty tons of water blown from the boilers, fires extinguished, sufficient number of the paddles removed from the wheels, which were lashed, the large smoke stack lowered on the hurricane deck, and the ship put under sail. Many of us thought if the Japanese could only get a sight of the funnel as it lay in its chocks like another huge “peace-maker” when we reached their country, they would prove quite accessible. The spars of the Mississippi being tall, she spread a great deal of canvass, but the wind continuing quite light we made but little progress for several days. A whale saluted us by tapping his head against our port guard. On the 18th we tacked ship, and on the 21st we got the trade-winds proper, and under studding-sails ran quite well. Life on the ocean, monotonous, nearly, at all times, was rendered more so to us, by the transition from a steamer to a sailing ship. To study on shipboard, or even to read with profit, as I had heard before, is next to impossible, unless it may be with an old sea-dog to whom for some forty years the “ocean has been a dwelling-place.” Try it, and you will find your eyes wandering from the type, and your thoughts bolting from the subject, like a refractory quarter-horse over a track railing. The weekly routine of the ship was comprised in going to quarters, morning and evening, for inspection; and once a week the whole ship’s company are beat to general quarters, when the magazines are open, the powder-boys busy in passing and repassing cartridge-boxes, the guns are cast loose and worked by their crews, boarders are called away, pikemen are posted to repel boarders, marines are stationed near them, &c.; the master gives his orders for sail-trimmers to put stoppers on such portions of the rigging, as an active imagination suggests must have been shot away, and all the evolutions of an actual engagement at sea are gone through; together with exercise at fire-quarters, when an alarm with the ship’s bell is rung, at which sentinels are placed at the falls of each boat, so that in an actual emergency there could be none of the inhuman desertion and infamous flight which marked the sad catastrophe of the “Arctic.” All of these exercises, which increase the discipline of a crew and the efficiency of a ship, are of course possessed of more interest to those officers who have military duties to perform on board, than others, who are too apt to experience the indifference of the Emerald isle native, who being informed that the house was on fire, replied it was nothing to him, he “was only a boarder.”

The weather we experienced in the trades was very pleasant, though it became hot with much suddenness. Pretty white clouds trooped across the sky like pilgrims in white, bound to Mecca. The regular waves as they came chasing one another from the horizon, rolled the whitest caps, and the sea was of the bluest, particularly as the lashed arms of our wheels divided the water in their passage, and the wheel-houses keeping off the direct rays of the sun, made it exquisitely transparent. Though the dews at night were so heavy that the moisture would run like rain off the awnings, yet the shadows of the big sails that had gone to sleep from the steadiness of the wind, made deeper by the bright moonlight and the illuminated image of the engine of our Savior’s agony—the “southern cross”—with its twinkling stars looking down from the sky, made one forget that the distance from the coast of Africa was not the greatest, and that the wearing of a thick coat at night, was a decided improvement on a thin one. Porpoises were almost in the daily practice of thrusting their swinish nozzles upon public attention, and innumerable graceful little flying-fish, disturbed by our passage through the water, or chased by the dolphin, flew continually across the waves ahead of us, like flocks of sparrows over briers. But then we had the smallpox on board, on the person of a Portuguese boy shipped at Funchal, and the possibility of contracting this loathsome disease, or the possession of an arm rather sore from vaccination, did not make the run more pleasurable.

The events of Christmas day were, that we were in 13° 23' north latitude, and 23° 48' west longitude; a very pleasant repast was spread by the ward-room, where “home with all its endearments” was drunk in Serchal; and a poor little bird very much resembling the partridge of our own country, was blown aboard. This little representative of Africa’s feathery race fell a victim to the taxidermist aboard. What he thought previous to his demise, of the day, I know not, but to me it was not Christmas; and no mental effort could “bring back the features that joy used to wear” when the mistletoe was hung, and the back log placed; nor could the defunct gobbler, who lately bestrode our coop, sole tenant, now lying in very brown state on a festive table, even provoke the pleasant memories.

The next day, promulgated by Commodore M.C. Perry, and signed by the then hiatus secretary of the navy, Mr. Swallow-Barn Kennedy, was read on the quarter-deck, General Order, No. 1, which, it is said, had a precedent in the expedition of Lieut. Wilkes, but which was as bad as its precedent, and equally unjust, being based upon the ridiculous premise that because a government may have claim upon your thews and sinews, or your mental aptitude in the line of your profession, that it likewise has property in the product of your brain, no matter in what other way, out of your calling, it may be exercised. This order was violated subsequently in China, in the grossest way, with the tacit consent of the commander-in-chief who first issued it; as if the prominent, in rule, or law, under our government were any more exempt from its provisions, than that the humblest are not beneath its control. I say in the grossest way, because he permitted, if he did not personally supervise, the preparation of an account of the movements of his squadron, for the colonial English newspapers at Hong-Kong, in preference to our own; papers too, whose columns at other times displayed the village squabbling, which marked the thunders, of the “Eatanswill Gazette” in Pickwick, in response to the shafts of “The Independent.”

The following is the order:—

“U. S. Steam Frigate, Mississippi,
“At Sea, December 21st, 1852.

“General Order, No. 1

“In promulgating the subjoined extract from the instructions addressed to me by the honorable secretary of the navy, and bearing date 13th ult., I have to enjoin upon all officers and other persons attached to the vessels under my command, or in any other way connected with the squadron, a most rigid adherence to all the requirements of said order.

“Whatever notes or drawings may be prepared by the officers or other persons before mentioned, whether by special order, or by their own volition, will be endorsed by the respective parties, and transmitted through the captain of the fleet to the commander-in-chief, who will in due time lodge them at the navy department, from whence they may be reclaimed as it may suit the convenience of the government.

“All arms, curiosities, and specimens of natural history, are also to become the property of the United States, unless voluntarily relinquished by the commander-in-chief.

“M. C. Perry,
“Commander of the U.S. Naval Forces,
“Stationed in the East India, China, and Japan Seas.”

[Extract.]

“A subject of great importance to the success of the expedition, will present itself to your mind in relation to communications to the prints and newspapers, touching the movements of your squadron, as well as in relation to all matters connected with the discipline and internal regulations of the vessels composing it. You will therefore enjoin upon all under your command to abstain from writing to friends and others upon these subjects, the journals and private notes of the officers and other persons in the expedition must be considered as belonging to the government until permission be received from the navy department to publish them.”

The effect of this order was to cause officers to decline keeping journals, and only note down their previous conceptions and present impressions of things and places seen, in their letters to relatives.

In 8° north of the equator we became becalmed, when the paddles were put on and we steamed away about eight knots. Our drinking water about this time showed a degree of vitality which was not made more agreeable by the fact that the naval regulations did not allow the wearing of the mustache, even for straining purposes.

About ten o’clock on the last night of ’52 there was a cry from the poop-deck of “man overboard!” when the engines were stopped, and the life-buoys suspended from either quarter of the ship were attempted to be gotten away, but not going quickly, nor their matchlocks igniting from some cause, gratings were hove overboard, lights sent up in the mizzen-top, and a metallic boat, the 2d cutter, in which went Lieutenant Webb, and Passed Midshipman K.R. Breese, was lowered and went in search of the unfortunate man. There was much solicitude felt for the poor fellow by those who stood on the poop peering into the darkness astern, eager to hear the least sound that indicated the man still afloat, but it was scarcely shown by the scene enacted during the absence of the boat. Up came the commodore: “What’s the bearing of that star?—Where did that man fall from?” Voice:—“Show the Commodore where the man fell from!”—man goes over to port side—“Take care of the paint!” “How does she head?” After a lapse of fifteen or twenty minutes the boat was heard returning, when the following was the hail:—“Mr. Webb?”—“Sir?”—“Have you got the buoy?”—“Yes, sir.”— “Have you got that man?” Answer: “Yes, sir,” which was one of much gratification, as every one regarded him as gone. The boat it appeared, had passed him, and having given up the search, was returning, and would have pulled over him, but for his being discovered in time by a bow-oarsman. He was floating without effort on the surface, although there was considerable sea on at the time. The poor fellow upon being taken on board was found to have swallowed a great deal of water, and it was thought that he might die from congestion of the lungs. He had the antithetical name of Dry, and his mind being afterward found affected, he was sent home in a merchant-ship from the Cape of Good Hope.

We crossed the equator on the 3d of January, in longitude 11° west, and when the “sun came up on the left” on the morning of the 10th, right ahead, perhaps in the very track of the Northumberland, looming sternly up from out the ocean, like the dark high walls of an ocean-prison that it is, we saw St. Helena. The tallest peak, that of Diana, is visible in the clouds for a great distance. At mid-day we anchored in the roadstead fronting James’ town, and shortly after saluted the flag of England with twenty-one guns. At no time, during a cruise of two years and over, did I hear any reverberation from our heavy pieces, half so magnificent. The sound of each explosion, at first seemed to recoil from the face of the immense rock which upreared itself in front, and then as if gathering strength from the temporary rebuff, it broke, in and up the wedge-shaped valley in which James’ town is situated, and appearing for a moment to die away, again went on over gorge and peak, tumbling, roaring, thundering in the distance, as if “Jura answered through her misty shroud.” The salute was returned by one of the number of forts that were looming away above us on the island.

In shore of us lay a number of sharp rakish-looking little vessels, slavers, that had been captured by the English cruisers, on the African station, and brought to the island to be adjudged by a local court of admiralty; better than our system where captor and prize have to return frequently, great distances to the United States.

The landing at St. Helena is made on a mole at one end of the small beach that lies only immediately in front of James’ town. A few minutes’ walk, and crossing a drawbridge, over a moat, you pass through an embattled wall, from which some iron pieces frown down on you, by a lofty gate, at which sentinels are always posted. On getting inside, a triangular street made of rolled gravel is before you. On the left are the guard quarters, the governor’s house and offices, and a public garden; on the right a church, hotel, and the ascent to Ladder hill, where is situated the highest fort of the place, reached by six hundred and twenty-five steps. Right before you, running from the apex of the triangle, is the road which leads to the spot which has made St. Helena famous, and England infamous for ever. As you ascend this road, you may look down on the settlements of the Chinese who have left the flowery kingdom to dwell in this place of isolation and desolation; also see the fine English soldier as he is being closely drilled from company to battalion, not by duke of Cambridge, or Earl Cardigan, all of whose bravery will not make up for want of tactical knowledge, but by sergeants.

Our stay at the island was to be only until we could get coal enough aboard to take us to Cape Town, and so on the following morning I started for Longwood and the now vacant tomb of Napoleon. I was not aware when I started on foot, that I had to walk a distance before returning to the town, of nine miles, and that too over a road of lava formation, and under the burning rays of a vertical sun. The ascent, at the first, is very great. Much fagged on reaching the summit point I sat down to rest, and surveyed the scene around. Near me on a road-stone, his bridleless and heavily-ladened little donkey cropping thistles not far off, in his parti-colored dress sat a Lascar quietly discussing his cigar. On the stone which he occupied, I read “1124 distance: 1180 feet elevation.” The road in the direction in which I was going was shut in by clumps of brushwood and some scrubby pines, above which, far away—its ragged top currying away the bottoms of the southeast trade-clouds which, blowing continually over the island, ever and anon drop their genial drops on the arid earth beneath—rose Diana’s peak hundreds of feet in air. But the view looking seaward: Sir Joshua Reynolds said that the horizon-line of the great and wide sea in mid-deep is one of the most striking emblems of the infinite and the eternal to be found in all the works of the Almighty. This idea, of all other places, arises in the mind when gazing from the eminences of St. Helena; but then, as you look upon “the sea here, the sea there, the sea all around,”—contrasted with the vast expanse, how small in the imagination becomes the spot on which you stand, and how coffined before death, must have felt the great spirit, to whom all Europe was once a theatre,—qui fait le tour du monde!

From where I sat, I could see in the gorge beneath, very plainly, the “Briers,” the home and habitation of Napoleon until Longwood could be gotten ready for his reception. It is situated behind a naked, stony hill, and must have been a warm abode, but Napoleon liked it for its quaintness and solitude; preferring it to better houses in the town, where privacy would have been impossible. The place is enclosed by low walls and rows of the prickly pear. On resuming my tramp, I passed some swarthy-featured, black-haired, fine-formed young women, barefooted, and lightly clad, carrying bundles of twigs on their heads, with which they walked, with apparently perfect indifference, notwithstanding the steepness of road and the intense rays of the sun. I soon reached and went by an old cottage in decay, a rusty signal-gun, a wayside inn with an embowered doorway, and then passing through a lane of trees, I entered upon a level road, which, in the space of three quarters of a mile, turned in crescent to the left. Some distance below, within this crescent, a lot of fir, cypress, and other trees, with grassy sod, terminated a small valley which commenced in desolation from the seaside. This spot was enclosed by a low, straggling fence, having a kind of sentry-box at its gate, and contains the vacant tomb of Napoleon. I descended to the place, paid the shilling entrance required of me, and entered the enclosure. The willow-tree which so invariably figured in all drawings of the spot, is now gone. The grave is enclosed by a plain iron railing, and, when I saw it, covered over with an awning. Its present appearance is that of the strong foundation of an elongated old spring-house, lined with cement. It is eight feet deep, having at the bottom a small recess sunk below the general level, which received the coffin, and about five feet wide. Desirous of getting the exact measurement of so much greatness, one of our party stretched himself at full length in this lower deep, but its chilliness soon made him have as little desire to continue there, as the old hero of New Orleans had to repose after death in the sarcophagus of one of the CÆsars, which the very considerate kindness of a commodore had brought for him. The whole surface of the plastering down in the tomb is covered with scarcely-legible names, or petty ambition’s trashy verses. The same very limited aspiration is to be seen in the pages of a register kept at the place, where the national animosities of visiting-strangers play shuttlecock and battledore. The obstinate and collected Englishman repeats the commonplace of Sir Walter Scott, in wishing you to behold the spot which held him for whom the earth was once too small, or ethically informs you, that one life being taken constitutes murder, but that of thousands makes a hero; then comes the mercurial Frenchman, who, after relieving himself by a great big “sacre” on the English nation generally and the island jailer in particular, says Napoleon is avenged, for Hudson Lowe “est mort;” or breaks out with “J’ai vu: J’ai maudit!” Next comes that peripatetic philosopher, Jonathan, who, smacking as usual of the shop, furnishes the edifying information that he belongs to the “Mary Brown, of New Bedford, has bin out over two years, and hain’t got but four hundred barrils of oil; hopes to be to ‘hum’ soon; and stopping at the island, has just come out to see Boney’s tomb!”

When the tomb contained the body of the great emperor, it was filled to within one foot of the surface, with earth, and covered in mound form with cement. The three slabs that closed the grave, were taken from the kitchen hearth of the Longwood jail. A cicerone, in the person of a gray-haired old negro woman, who saw both the interment and the exhumation of the remains of Napoleon, tells you in an Ethiopic vernacular, of the incidents of the spot; after enumerating the number of coffins in which the body was placed, she said, “Dare, sir, laid his head, and here was his feet.”—“He always used to drink at dat dare spring, dare.”—“I’s seen him many a time come down dat hill dare wid his snuff-box and one of General Bertram’s children.”—“When he used to stop still, he’d do jest so”—folding her arms. She was also quite minute in her mention of the “Prince de Jonnyville” in the “Belpooly.”

The spot was pointed out to me where Bertrand, Gourgaud, Las Casas, and Marchand, erected the tent to put the body under after exhumation, which took place amid wind and rain. All around the tomb was wet and miry; in times of heavy rains, now, the tomb is not unfrequently filled with water. The work of disinterment was begun after midnight, and by seven o’clock in the morning the stones that closed the lower vault were raised. The anvil employed by the men engaged upon the work to keep their tools in order, sank at every blow, and the men were ankle deep in mud. I have nothing pathetic or philosophic to add, upon the spot;

Ascending the hill on the other side, by a winding path which led up through a pretty garden, I stopped at the little residence of “Hutt’s gate,” formerly occupied by General Bertrand, with his family, previous to moving out to the building in the vicinity of Longwood. After resting here, I footed it a mile further, to the outer entrance to the grounds of Longwood. The prospect before me during this walk was of the dreariest and most desolate kind, presenting the most marked contrast to the verdure at the tomb. It was along this road that Napoleon walked to his favorite spring, and over which his Chinese coolies carried his water from it. After passing a dilapidated wall and gate, you enter upon a lawn of some hundred yards, on one side of which are straggling fir-trees, bent down in the same direction by the continual pressure of the southeast trade-winds, which are felt at this part of the island very strongly, and the other side was hedged by a long row of the stately aloe. In a few minutes you are in front of a dilapidated low building, with a small verandah in front of one of its wings, and partly enclosed in an old stone wall. This is Longwood as it now is. When I reached it, the place looked abandoned in the extreme, with the exception of the cows and a scrawny donkey that browsed around, or a solitary turkey who broke the silence with his gobble. There was the decayed and silent guard-house and signal-tower, its halyards rotted away and pole tottering, from which the restless bunting was for ever telling by day to the sedulous jailer at “Plantation House” how his great prisoner at Longwood, after the mental exhaustion of dictation, or the fatigues of a morning walk, now slept, or that, having slept, he was now feeding his pet fishes in the little pond in the rear of his cell abode. This quiet was soon broken; a dirty-faced, uncombed-haired English girl approached, and informed us that the fee for admission to the house was two shillings—Longwood, like the grounds around the tomb, being leased by the government to others, for the purpose of speculating on the interest of association connected with the great emperor. If we are the “dollar people,” can any man who has ever visited English domain say, that they are not entitled to the name of “shilling nation!”

The first room you enter on going into the house, is the one in which, amid storm and rain, and when

its booming reaching the now drowsy ear which was once attuned to the roar of cannon on a hundred fields, with the ejaculation of “tÊte d’armÉe” on his nearly motionless lips, died Napoleon. The head of his bed rested against the sill of a window, from underneath which the French have removed the stone, and placed it in the Hospital des Invalides as a precious relic. Through the sashless opening, the sun now streams in on the floor of a room occupied by a thrashing-machine, and with a manger overhead; while the room in which he mostly slept, and ate, and read, is now paved with cobble-stones, and filled with horse-stalls. The fish-pond is dry, and the grave of his favorite horse you can not find.

Just across the road I visited the new house of Longwood, its walls sound, its porticoes and floors in a perfect state of preservation, and its spacious rooms unoccupied. Napoleon visited it once, but feeling that one jail was no less one for being better built than another, spurned this offer of the English to conciliate him in his cage, as the lion spurns the leavings of the jackal though he die in his den.

On my way back to James’ town, I passed in sight of the grounds and former mansion of

“The paltry jailer and the prying spy”—

“Plantation house”—but had no desire to visit it.

At James’ town there is a very fine bust of Napoleon, said to have been made from a plaster cast of the face, taken after death; the nose is much more exquisitely chiselled and beautiful than any other representation to be seen of his face.

Before nightfall on the 11th of January, we were under way for the Cape of Good Hope from St. Helena.