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Table of Contents

The Author embarks at New York, with his Indian Collection, and cage with two grizly Bears, for England, in the fall of 1839—Packet-ship Roscius, Captain Collins—Gale in the middle of the ocean—A ship dismasted and in distress—The Captain and twenty-eight men taken off and saved—The shipwrecked Captain and his faithful dog—“My man Daniel”—Sailor’s nose taken off by grizly bear—Dr. Madden—Terrible gale—Sea-sickness of the grizly bears—Alarm on deck—“Bears out of their cage”—Passengers rush below and close the hatches—A supposed Bear enters the cabin!—Great excitement—The explanation—The gale subsides—Amusing mistake—The Author in the steerage—Two eccentric characters—Arrival in Liverpool.

In the fall of the year 1839 I embarked at New York on board of the packet-ship Roscius, Captain Collins, for Liverpool, with my Indian collection; having received a very friendly letter of advice from the Hon. C. A. Murray, master of Her Majesty’s household, who had formerly been a fellow-traveller with me on the Mississippi and other rivers in America; and who, on his return to London, had kindly made a conditional arrangement for my collection in the Egyptian Hall, in Piccadilly.

Mr. George Adlard, an Englishman, residing in the city of New York, had also exerted a friendly influence for me in procuring an order from the Lords of Her Majesty’s Treasury for passing my collection into the kingdom free from the customary duties; and under these auspices I was launched upon the wide ocean, with eight tons freight, consisting of 600 portraits and other paintings which I had made in my sojourn of eight years in the prairies and Rocky Mountains of America—several thousands of Indian articles, costumes, weapons, &c., with all of which I intended to convey to the English people an accurate account of the appearance and condition of the North American tribes of Indians.1

On board also, as a part of my heavy collection, and as a further illustration of the rude inhabitants of the “Far West” I had, in a huge iron cage, two grizly bears, from the Rocky Mountains; forming not only the heaviest and most awkward part of my freight, but altogether the most troublesome, as will be seen hereafter.

The wind was kind to us, and soon drove us across the Atlantic, without more than an incident or two worth recording, which I had minuted down as follows:—About the middle of the ocean, and in the midst of a four or five days’ heavy gale, we came suddenly upon a ship, partly dismasted, with signals of distress flying, and water-logged, rolling about at the mercy of the merciless waves. We rounded-to with great danger to our own craft, and, during the early part of the night, succeeded, with much difficulty, in taking off the captain and crew of twenty-eight men, just before she went down. This was a common occurrence, however, and needs no further notice, other than of a feature or two which struck me as new. When the poor, jaded, and water-soaked fellows were all safely landed on the deck of our vessel, they laid down upon their faces and devoutly thanked God for their deliverance; and last of all that was lifted on board from their jolly-boat was their keg of rum, the only thing which they had brought with them when they deserted the ship. “This,” good Captain Collins said, “you will not want now, my boys,” and he cast it into the sea.

Captain James, a bland and good-natured Scotsman, commander of the Scotia, the unfortunate vessel, was invited by Captain Collins to the cabin of the Roscius, and into his state-room, where he was soon put into a suit of dry and warm clothes, and afterwards seated at the table; where, suddenly, a sullen resistance to food, and contemplative tears rolling over his cheeks, showed his rough shell to contain a heart that was worthy of the fondest affections of a dear wife and sweet little ones—none of which was he blessed with, if I recollect aright. But when his grief found utterance, he exclaimed, “My God! I have left my poor dog tied to the mast of my old craft. There he is, poor fellow! When we took to the jolly-boat I never thought of my poor Pompey!”

The briny tears seemed to burn this veteran’s hardened features as they ran over his cheeks; and hunger and fatigue, and all gave way to them and grief, until sleep had dried them up, and taken the edge from his anguished mind.

The next morning, his recital of the affectionate deeds of the life of his faithful dog, “who had made eighteen voyages across the Atlantic with him, and who would always indicate land a-head by his nose sooner than the sailors could discern it from the mast-head—whom he had, in kindness, lashed to the mast for his safety, and in carelessness abandoned to his unavoidable fate,” brought tears of pity in my own eyes. Poor man! he often wept for his faithful dog—and I as often wept for him, on our way from the middle of the ocean to Liverpool. We were, at this time, still in the midst of the terrible gale, which was increasing in its fury, and had already become quite too much for the tastes and the stomachs of the grizlies—a few words more of whom must go into this chapter.

These two awkward voyageurs from the base of the Rocky Mountains, which I had reared from cubs, and fed for more than four years—for whose roughness in clawing and “chawing” I had paid for half a dozen cages which they had demolished and escaped from, and the prices of as many dogs “used up” in retaking them, had now grown to the enormous size of eight or ten hundred pounds each; requiring a cage of iron so large that it could not be packed amongst the ship’s cargo below, but must needs occupy a considerable space on the deck, in the form and size somewhat of a small house.

The front of this cage was formed of huge iron bars, kindly indulging the bruins to amuse themselves with a peep at what was progressing on deck, whilst it afforded the sailors and steerage passengers the amusement of looking and commenting upon the physiognomy and manœuvres of these rude specimens from the wilderness of America. This huge cage, with its inmates, had ridden into and partly through the gale with us, when the bears became subjects of more violent interest and excitement than we had as yet anticipated or could have wished. What had taken (and was taking) place amongst the sick and frightened group of passengers during this roaring, whistling, thrashing, and dashing gale, was common-place, and has been a thousand times described; but the sea-sickness, and rage, and fury of these two grizly denizens of the deep ravines and rocky crags of the Rocky Mountains, were subjects as fresh as they were frightful and appalling to the terrified crew and passengers who were about them, and therefore deserve a passing comment.

The immediate guardian of these animals was a faithful man by the name of Daniel Kavanagh, who had for several years been in my employment as curator of my collection, and designed to accompany me in my tour through England. This man has occupied a conspicuous place in my affairs in Europe, and much will be said of him in the following pages, and the familiar and brief cognomen of “Daniel” or “Dan” applied to him. On embarking with this man and his troublesome pets at New York, I had fully explained to Captain Collins their ferocious, and deceitful, and intractable nature, who had consequently issued his orders to all of his crew and to the steerage passengers not to venture within their reach, or to trifle with them. Notwithstanding all this precaution, curiosity, that beautiful trait of human nature, which often becomes irresistible in long voyages, and able to turn the claws of the Devil himself into the soft and tapering fingers of a Venus or a Daphne, got the better of the idle hours of the sailors, who were amusing themselves and the passengers, in front of the iron bars, by believing that they were wearing off by a sort of charm the rough asperities of their grizly and grim passengers by shaking their paws, and squaring and fending off the awkward sweeps occasionally made at them by the huge paw of the she bear, which she could effectually make by lying down and running her right arm quite out between the iron bars. On one of these (now grown to be amusing) occasions, one of the sailors was “squared off” before the cage, inviting her grizly majesty to a sort of set-to, when she (seemingly aware of the nature of the challenge) gradually extended her arm and her huge paw a little and a little further out of her cage, with her eyes capriciously closed until it was out to its fullest extent, when she made a side-lick at his head, and an exceedingly awkward one for the sailor to parry. It was lucky for him, poor fellow, that he partly dodged it; though as her paw passed in front of his face, one of her claws carried away entirely his nose, leaving it fallen down and hanging over his mouth, suspended merely by a small piece of skin or gristle, by which alone he could claim it.

Here was a sudden check to the familiarity with the bears; the results of which were, a renewal of the orders of non-intercourse from Captain Collins, and a marked coolness between the sailors and steerage passengers and the grizlies during the remainder of the voyage.

The sailor was committed to the care of Dr. Madden, in the cabin, the distinguished traveller in Africa and the West Indies, and now one of our esteemed fellow-passengers, who skilfully replaced and arranged his nose with stitches and splints, and attended to it during the voyage. The poor fellow continued to swear vengeance on the bears when they should reach the land; but I believe that when they were landed in Liverpool, his nose was not sufficiently secure to favour his design. This unlucky affair had happened some days previous to the gale which I have begun to describe; and with the unsociable and cold reserve with which they were subsequently treated by all on board (visited only at stated periods by their old, but not yet confiding friend Daniel, who brought them their daily allowance), they had, as I have mentioned, become partakers and sufferers with us in the pangs and fears of the hurricane that was sweeping over the vessel and the sea about us.

The third day of the gale became the most alarming, and the night of that day closing in upon us, seemed like the gloomy shroud amidst the hurrying winds and the cracking spars, that was to cover us in death. Until this day, though swinging (and now and then jumping) from mountains to mountains of waves, the ship and the elements mingled our fears with amusement. When, however, this day’s light was gone, curiosity’s feast was finished, and fear was no longer chained under our feet—we had reached the climax of danger, and terror seemed to have seized and reigned through every part of the ship. The bears, in contemplative or other vein, had been mute; but at this gloomy hour, seeming to have lost all patience, added, at first their piteous howlings, and then their horrid growls, to the whistling of the winds; and next, the gnashing of their teeth, and their furious lurches, and bolts, and blows against the sides of their cage, to the cracking of spars and roaring of the tempest! Curiosity again, in desperate minds, was resuscitated, and taking in its insatiable draughts even in the midst of this jarring and discordant medley of darkness—of dashing foam, of cracking masts, and of howlings and growlings and raging of grizly bears; for when the lightnings flashed, men (and even women) were seen crawling and hanging about the deck, as if to see if they could discover the death that was ready with his weapons drawn to destroy them.

The captain had twenty times ordered all below, but to no purpose, until in the indiscriminate confusion of his crew and the passengers, in the jet blackness of the gale, when his ship was in danger, and our lives, his trumpet announced that “the bears were on deck!”

“Good God!” was exclaimed and echoed from one end of the ship’s deck to the other; “the grizly bears are out! down with the hatches—down the hatches!” The scrambling that here took place to reach the cabins below can only be justly known to each actor who performed his part in his own way; and of these there were many. Some descended headlong, some sidewise, and others rolled down; and every one with a ghastly glance back upon the one behind him, as a grizly bear, of course, that was to begin his “chawing” the next moment.

When the scrambling was all over, and the hatches all safe, all in the cabin were obliged to smile for a moment, even in the midst of the alarm, at the queer position and manœuvres of a plump little Irish woman who had slipped down the wrong hatchway by accident, and left her “other half” to spend a night of celibacy, and of awful forebodings, in the steerage, where she would have gone, but to which her own discretion as well as the united voices of the cabin passengers decided her not to attempt to make her way over the deck during the night.

The passengers, both fore and aft, were now all snugly housed for the rest of the night, and the captain’s smothered voice through his trumpet, to his hands aloft, and the stamping of the men on deck, while handling the ropes and shifting the sails, were all caught by our open ears, and at once construed into assaults and dreadful conflicts with the grizly bears on deck.

In the midst of these conjectures some one of the passengers screamed and sprang from near the stairway entering the cabin, when it was discovered, to the thrilling amazement of all, that one of the bears had pawed open the hatchway, and was descending into the cabin! The ladies’ salon, beyond the cabin, was the refuge to which the instant rush was making, when the always good and musical sound of the captain’s voice was recognized. “Why! you don’t think I’m a grizly bear, do you?” The good fellow! he didn’t intend to frighten anybody. He had just raised the hatch and came down to get a little breath and a “drop to drink.” He is as unlike to a grizly bear as any one else in the world, both in looks and in disposition; but he happened to have on for the occasion a black oil-cloth hood or cap, which was tied under the chin; and a jacket covered with long fur on the outside, making his figure (which was of goodly size, and which just filled the gangway), with a little of the lively imagination belonging to such moments, look the counterpart of a grizly bear. “Where’s Catlin?” said he; “damn the bears!” “Are they out?” cried the passengers all together. “Out?—yes; they have eaten one man already, and another was knocked overboard with a handspike; he was mistaken for one of the bears. We are all in a mess on deck—it’s so dark we can’t see each other—the men are all aloft in the rigging. Steward! give me a glass of brandy-and-water—the ship must be managed, and I must go on deck. Keep close below here, and keep the hatches down, for the bruins are sick of the scene, and pawing about for a burrow in the ground, and will have the hatches up in a moment if you don’t look to them. Where’s Catlin?” “We don’t know,” was the reply from many mouths; “he is not in the cabin.”

“Will, here, Misther Captain, yer honour, I’ll till ye,” said a poor fellow, who in the general fright and flight had tumbled himself by accident into the cabin, and observed sullen silence until the present moment; “I’ll jist till ye—I saw Misther Cathlin (I sippose he’s the jintleman that owns the bastes) and his mon Dan (for I’ve known Dan for these many a long year in ould Amiriky, and I now he has chargin o’ the bears on board); I saw the two, God bliss them, when the bastes was about gettin their hinder parts out of the cage, stannin on the side jisth before ’em, Misther Cathlin with his double-barrel gun, and his mon Dan pointin at ’em in the face, with a pistol in each hand; and this was jist whin I heard they were outh, and I jimped down here jist in the wrong place, as I am after observin when it is too late, and I hope there is no offence to your honour.”

“Catlin’s gone then,” said the captain; “he is swallowed!”

The captain was at his post again, the hatches closed, and in the midst of dozing, and praying, and singing (and occasionally the hideous howlings of the grizlies whenever a wave made a breach over the deck of the vessel) was passed away that night of alarm and despair, until the rays of the morning’s sun having chased away the mist and assuaged the fury of the storm, had brought all hands together on the deck, and in the midst of them the cheerful face of our good captain; and in their huge cage, which had been driven from one side of the deck to the other, but now adjusted, sitting upon their haunches, with the most jaded and humiliating looks imaginable, as they gazed between their iron bars, their two grizly majesties, who had hurt nobody during the night, nor in all probability had meditated anything worse or more sinful than an escape, if possible, from the imprisonment and danger they considered themselves unfortunately in.

In the general alarm and scramble on deck in the forepart of the night, the total darkness having been such that it was impossible to tell whether the bears were out of their cage or not, and quite impossible to make one’s way to the quarter-deck, unaccustomed to the shapes of things to be passed over, “Misther Cathlin” had dropped himself into the steerage as the nearest refuge, just before the hatch was fastened down for the night. Any place, and anything under deck at that time, was acceptable; and even at so perilous a moment, and amidst such alarming apprehensions, I drew a fund of amusement from the scenes and conversations around me. The circumstance of sixty passengers, men, women, and children, being stowed into so small a compass, and to so familiar an acquaintance, would have been alone, and under different circumstances, a subject of curious interest for a stranger so suddenly to be introduced to; but to be dropped into the midst of such a group in the middle of the night, in the thickest of a raging tempest, and the hour of danger, when some were in bed—some upon their knees at their prayers—others making the most of the few remaining drops of brandy they had brought with them, and others were playing at cards and enjoying their jokes, and all together just rescued from the jaws and the claws of the bears over their heads, was one of no common occurrence, and worthy at least of a few passing remarks.

The wailings of the poor fellow whose wife had got into the cabin were incessant, and not much inferior to the howlings of the grizlies on deck. She had been put into my berth, and I had had the privilege of “turning in” with her disconsolate husband, if I had seen fit to have done so, or if his writhings and contortions had not taken up full twice the space allotted to him. It was known and told to him by some of his comrades, that they saw his wife go into the cabin, and that she was safe. “Yis,” said he, “but I’m unasy, I’m not asy about her, d’ye see; I don’t fale asy as she’s there, God knows where, along with those jintlemen.”

Amongst the passengers in this part of the vessel I at once found myself alongside of at least two very eccentric characters. The one, I afterwards learned, was familiarly called by the passengers “the little Irishman in black,” and the other “the half-Englishman, or broken-down swell.”

The first of these two eccentrics was a squatty little gentleman of about four feet nine inches elevation, and between two and three feet breadth of beam, with a wrinkled face and excessively sharp features. To be all in black he showed no signs of a shirt, though he was decently clad, but in black from head to foot, being in mourning, as he said, for “his son who had emigratin to Amiriky fifteen years sin, and livin there jist long enough to become a native, had died and leaven of a fortin, which he had been over to sittle up and receivin, with which he was recrossin the ocean to his native country.” He said he wished to be rispectable and dacent, havin received 12,000 dollars; and as he thought the dacent thing was in “payin,” now-a-days, he had paid for a berth in the cabin, but preferred to ride in the steerage. He made and found much amusement in that part of the vessel with his congenial spirits, and seemed peculiarly happy in the close communication with the other oddity of the steerage, whom I have said the passengers called the half-Englishman, or broken-down swell, who, I learned from my man Daniel, had laid in three barrels of old English porter, in bottles, when leaving the city of New York, and the last of which they were now opening and making the whole company merry with, as a sort of thanksgiving on their lucky escape from the grizly bears, who they firmly believed held possession of everything on the vessel outside of the hatchway.

This eccentric and droll, but good-natured gentleman, with the aid of porter made much amusement in the steerage, even in the hour of alarm; and though I did not at that time know his calibre, or exactly what to make of him, I afterwards learned that he was an English cockney who had been on a tour through the States, and was now on his way back to his fatherland. He had many amusing notions and anecdotes to relate of the Yankees, and in his good-natured mellowness told a very good one of himself, much to the amusement of the Yankees on board, and the little Irishman in black, and my man Daniel. He said that “the greatest luxury he found in New York were the hoisters, and much as he liked them he had eaten them for two years before he had learned whether they were spelled with a haitch or a ho.” Much valuable time would be lost to the reader if I were to chain him down to the rest of the incidents that happened between the middle of the ocean and Liverpool; and I meet him there at the beginning of my next chapter.