<\/p>\n
On January 20, 1851 William Heath was still on the island of Mauritius in the Indian Ocean. He remarked that this was the very day he and the Captain of the Barnstable had originally predicted for their arrival in New York. But here he was stranded on this far-away island since November 22nd, nearly two months, and the ship was not yet ready to sail.<\/p>\n
William tells us about some of the acquaintances he had made on the island. There was Mr. Alling and his charming wife. “l have about made his house my home”, William said. The Allings had a son and a twenty year old adopted daughter. Then there was a man named Mitchell, who considered Byron and Shelley greater poets than Shakespeare and Milton, but whose daughters Mary and Elizabeth, William deemed more sensible. Charlie Hampton was a very queer fellow and, says William, “very, very green”. Then there was DeCousen, a Frenchman; Murray, a Scot; and young Rompell, who was afraid of his wife. He found a clerk named Gleason to be a very mean man who had an Irish tartar for a wife. But a Captain Stevens and a Mr. Hunt he called “very human acquaintances”.<\/p>\n
By this time William had made peace with the Captain of the Barnstable, patching up the quarrel that had occurred when the Captain had called the boy a blockhead and told him he must find quarters ashore. William did spend a great deal of time ashore, in the homes of the acquaintances we have just mentioned, but he still made his headquarters on the ship. He had two chances to go to the States on other vessels, but turned them down to stay with the Barnstable. One of those chances was in a ship commanded by Captain Healy of Rockland, Maine. William says of it: “On January 30 Captain Healy left port. I went out to the bell buoy with him. He pressed me to visit him in Rockland. I lent him my black hat, which he promised to send to Waterville.”<\/p>\n
It was on February 13, 1851 when William Heath finally said goodbye to the island of Mauritius. He wrote in the diary: “Hurrah! We are off at last on the rolling waves. Mauritius is no longer in sight. Last night, in our farewell party at Alling’s, the champagne flowed freely and, as I drank with each one separately, it was not long before I was feeling very joyful. Well, it is now goodbye forever to this island. I have made some good friends on it, but I am mighty glad to get away.”<\/p>\n
On March 4, after more than a fortnight at sea, spent chiefly in his usual pursuit of reading, William wrote: “Here we are off the Cape of Good Hope, in a gale from the southwest. Exchanged signals with a Yankee and Britisher yesterday.”<\/p>\n
On the next day they were safely out in the Atlantic. and William commented: “We are really going home now; no more capes to double and every mile we sail is a mile nearer New England.”<\/p>\n
On March 12 William celebrated his 17th birthday. He boasted that he had grown an inch taller during the year, but he still reached only 5 feet 6 inches.<\/p>\n
The Captain honored the occasion by giving William a good dinner and champagne. William entrusted to the diary this comment: “Seventeen years of age. It seems but yesterday when I was only seven, crying at the least inconvenience. Now I am almost a man and have. I hope, acted like one since I left California.”<\/p>\n
On March 14 William had an interesting conversation with the Captain about Dana’s book “Two Years Before the Mast”. They disagreed on the dangers of life at sea. William, who agreed that it is a hazardous occupation, felt that he was vindicated the next day when a seaman on the Barnstable fell seventy feet from the main topmast to the deck. Miraculously the fellow broke no bones and suffered only a severe shaking up. William commented: “If he had been a white man, I should have been spattered with his brains.”<\/p>\n
On April 2 the ship “took the northeast trade winds”, as William expressed it, and they sped along at eight knots an hour.<\/p>\n
On April 12 they came into that part of the Atlantic which sailors call the Doldrums, the area of prolonged calms. William was exasperated. “Not a breath of air is stirring. This is tormenting. When I expected to stand on my native soil in two weeks. to be delayed this way is very provoking.”<\/p>\n
Four days later, on April 16, they had even worse luck. As William put it, they were “getting ahead backwards. On the 13th”, he wrote, “we were caught in the tailwind of a nor’wester. We tried to tack against it, first on one tack. then on the other; but we steadily lost ground.”<\/p>\n
Three days later, on the 19th, things were little better. “The winds”, said William, “seem determined not to let us get home this month. We have been through the worst squall I have seen since I left China. We were prepared for it with almost naked spars. all our sails stoutly reefed. It passed over in about half an hour, but while it lasted it tossed our ship about like a chip on a mill pond. There is now quite a sea running, and we cannot carry much canvas for fear of knocking out our main spars. We have now been more than a week sailing only four degrees on our course.”<\/p>\n
On April 22 William let loose with venomous language: “Oh, this is terrible! My patience has entirely left me. We have been hove-to all day in the face of another nor’wester. We are jammed up under a close-reefed mainsail. The wind is blowing strong enough to split a fellow’s cheeks. Let them talk of Cape Horn and Good Hope and the China Sea, but for a heavy wind and a heaving ocean I’ll give them the east coast of our own United States. It is very cold, and to crown it all, I have the toothache again.”<\/p>\n
On April 25 he said: “This is the day we expected to be in New York. We are still in trouble with the northwest wind. I think I know what the sailors mean when they say ‘He who goes to sea for pleasure would go to Hell for justice. “‘<\/p>\n
By the 28th they were not much nearer to New York. William wrote: “We have some Jonah aboard this ship. We had enjoyed a good run before a southeast wind when it suddenly shifted into the southwest. The barometer fell rapidly and it began to look very black to windward. Before the men could reef all the sails, the tempest struck. I thought I had seen strong winds before, but nowhere on the Pacific had I seen anything like this. It was impossible for any seaman to remain aloft. Our quarter boat on the weather side broke loose and was smashed before it could be secured. I was standing on the weather side when suddenly a gust of wind picked me up and threw me bodily into the lee scuppers, and I sprained my ankle badly. I could just crawl into the cabin. The violence of the gale continued for four hours. the side of their own weight. I expected any minute to see the masts go over. The Captain declares it was the worst storm he ever experienced on this coast. I have seen a typhoon in the China Sea, but it was nothing compared to this.”<\/p>\n
The next day William wrote: “I shall never again speculate on the probable time of our arrival home. I make no more predictions until we are in sight of Sandy Hook. Yesterday I had to record a terrific hurricane. Today we have seen the passage of a whirlwind. In mid-afternoon dark clouds appeared in the northwest. The wind picked up speed and hail the size of cherries poured down, covering the deck. Suddenly the forewatch pointed to a water spout on the weather beam, headed directly for our ship. The men descended from the yards as fast as squirrels. The Captain got the ship square before the wind, and that was all that saved us. The spout passed less than a hundred feet away and stirred up the water so that we were nearly capsized.”<\/p>\n
On the last day of April the Barnstable’s captain hailed another ship because provisions were getting low. William says: “The Captain and I went aboard. The ship was the whaler Brookline of New London, bound in from the Arctic with a load of polar oil. She had been as far north as 72 degrees, where she was stopped by a barrier of solid ice. We have a fair wind at last and should be in the Gulf Stream tomorrow.”<\/p>\n
By the next evening they were through the Gulf Stream and three days later, on May 4th, they arrived in New York.<\/p>\n
The last entry in William Heath’s long journal was made on May 15, 1851. It said: “I arrived home on the 8th, just a week ago. Everyone is well. I have begun to study again, reading Caesar and writing Latin. It comes quite easy to me. Everyone tells me that my features have changed greatly. A great many of my old acquaintances did not know me till I mentioned my name.”<\/p>\n
William Heath, in company with his father Solyman, had left home on April 5, 1849. He returned two years, one month and three days later, on May 8, 1851. He had been across the plains and mountains of the American west by covered wagon, had seen the tough life of the California gold rush, had sailed across the vast Pacific to China, had spent two months in the Celestial Empire, had sailed down the China coast to the Java Sea and across the Indian Ocean, only to be held up by a leaking ship for nearly three months on the French island of Mauritius, then at last had sailed around the Cape of Good Hope and across the Atlantic to New York. A boy who had left home less than a month after his fifteenth birthday, had come back two months after his seventeenth — a remarkable experience for a boy of that age. In two years William Heath had been completely around the world.<\/p>\n
I think there are few families in Maine who can show such a record — the record of two important historical diaries written by father and son. Solyman Heath’s journal of the wagon journey to California, and William Heath’s journal of his long voyage from San Francisco to China and around Africa to New York.<\/p>\n
Although I have mentioned it several times on this program, I keep getting inquiries about the Bingham Purchase. It is indeed a Maine subject that deserves frequent mention, for few more important land deals were ever made within our state. That trade in 1792 transferred two million acres of Maine land for 12t\u00a2 an acre, and it influenced the price of Maine timberland for many years. It started a boom in land speculation that lasted for nearly a century. At the peak of the boom land that had once been offered for six cents an acre was selling for ten dollars.<\/p>\n
The vast acreage was originally purchased by Gen. Henry Knox and his partner, William Duer. But, being unable to finance the deal, Duer went to prison for debt, and Knox appealed to his Philadelphia friend, William Bingham, to take the white elephant off his hands. Bingham agreed. Although he was a wealthy man, the deal was so big that it tied up much of his capital. To free money for other enterprises he launched a campaign to sell the land as quickly as possible. It seems that nobody in America had money to risk on such a speculation. So Bingham sent Major Henry Jackson to Europe to seek out prospective buyers. Jackson succeeded in interesting the great London banking firm of Baring and Hope. They bought a million acres of the Bingham lands. Bingham tried to palm off on Baring the northern half of the lands, in the upper Kennebec region, but Baring insisted on an undivided half interest in the whole tract. But Bingham did very well on the deal. Baring and Hope paid him 44 and nine-tenths cents an acre for a million acres that had cost him 12t cents an acre — a very handsome profit.<\/p>\n
And with that story of how one man made a lot of money by a single sale of a million acres of Maine land, we must say Goodnight for Old Time’s Sake.<\/p>\n
Year: 1960<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Read the script for “Little Talks” program #450, Broadcast on March 6, 1960<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":405,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[766,35296],"tags":[],"builder_content":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8063"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/405"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8063"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8063\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8063"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8063"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8063"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}