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LETTERS FROM THE
or copper-fastened like our ship; and the little Monsieur sat aiding to quicken a dogvane, of cork-bodv and feather-wings ; I stood with folded arms, wrapt in awe and contemplation, gazing abroad on the illimitable expanse of ocean; until my mind reeled with the “immensity of her own conceptions.-’ Did it require so vast a saline surface to be sun-drawn, and freshened into wandering clouds, to fertilize the dusty and thirsty ground ? Or was it necessary that nations, born from the same parents, should be thus unapproachably separated, to prevent their mutually quarrelling, and encroaching upon each other’s rights ? While admiring at the large ships in sight, those masterpieces of human art, which bring distant and unknown worlds together; the Captain ludicrously described the ungainly Chinese junks, that he had seen on India voyages; which arc shaped somewhat like the wooden bowls, in which the three wise men of Gotham went to sea; and which they ofttimes navigate without a compass; heaven’s moon being their lighthouse, and heaven's stars their charts.
Our ship began now, in a calm, to rock like a cradle ; aiid now, in a breeze, to bound into a curvet; and now began my brain to rock, and to curvet, with it. The broad gentle sidewise swell is more dizzying, than the strong straightforward ridges of ocean.
I was the only one in the cabin, who had not before been on the great deep, and who had not an “ undergoing stomach.” The imagination ran on cas-
^}cadcs, and cataracts. Thus was my lot, day after tgj^'day, moping and musing through the watches of the night; while others were supine in their crimson-^p^'cifrtained births, which to me were deaths, sleeping |$!.and purring in feline quietude. Franklin’s drops of oil might assuage the fury of the waves: but the lH^captain’s oil of vitriol would not appease the tumult Miin my breast. Sea-qualms, though effecting an ^'^.earthquake of ribs, and threatening the parting of |jf|fsoul and body, like the hypochondria, meet little sym-ffl$|'pathy. It is, however, some vain self-condolence, iy&-that bosoms of the finest sensibility are most predis-Jll'posed to them. When one asked of the son of green ^Erin, who had purposely sickened his breast to dis-|j||fpossess it of acrid humours, how he felt? he repli-
f ed :—“0 I am sick very well.” To counteract the effects of the saline atmosphere, = take agreeable prunes to sea with you; they are.ji friendly fruit. •^The captain had two cages of’gray' mocking-birds, pi/to which, if taken sea-sick, he was^Birected by the ^bird-seller to administer a spiderYo cure them.
Before entering the Gulf, the passengers had -^'loaded their rifles, carabines, and pistols; as, on the ^week preceding, two vessels had been boarded and J^Pplundered, even in the mouth of the river, by cor-Ijgjv.sairs. The Bluebeard of these unprincipled adven-||pturers was quite courtly in his splendidum furlum, Mias king James used to call it:—“Good day, my pj|friends; hard times ; we request a few of your light -^■articles, if you please (presenting arms); take care
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