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Dana, Richard Henry, 1815-1882

"Two Years Before the Mast"

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.


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