Chapter 6 - Page 2

for
he was liberal enough in his commendations. The private intelligence
he had received of the relations between France and America, quickened
his natural impulses; and, by the time we reached St. Helena, the ship
might have been said to be in good fighting order for a merchantman.
We touched at this last-mentioned island for supplies, but obtained no
news of any interest. Those who supplied the ship could tell us
nothing but the names of the Indiamen who had gone out and home for
the last twelvemonth, and the prices of fresh meat and vegetables.
Napoleon civilized them, seventeen years later.

We had a good run from St. Helena to the calm latitudes, but these
last proved calmer than common. We worried through them after a while,
however, and then did very well until we got in the latitude of the
Windward Islands. Marble one day remarked to me that Captain Digges
was standing closer to the French island of Guadaloupe than was at all
necessary or prudent, if he believed in his own reports of the danger
there existed to American commerce, in this quarter of the ocean.

I have lived long enough, and have seen too much of men and things, to
fancy my country and countrymen right in all their transactions,
merely because newspapers, members of congress, and fourth of July
orators, are pleased to affirm the doctrine. No one can go much to sea
without reading with great distrust many of the accounts, in the
journals of the day, of the grievous wrongs done the commerce of
America by the authorities of this or that port, the seizure of such a
ship, or the imprisonment of some particular set of officers and
men. As a rule, it is safer to assume that the afflicted parties
deserve all that has happened to them, than to believe them
immaculate; and, quite likely, much more, too. The habit of receiving
such appeals to their sympathies, renders the good people of the
republic peculiarly liable to impositions of this nature; and the
mother who encourages those of her children who fetch and carry, will
be certain to have her ears filled with complaints and tattle.
Nevertheless, it is a fact beyond all dispute, that the commerce of
the country was terribly depredated on by nearly all the European
belligerents, between the commencement of the war of the French
revolution and its close. So enormous were the robberies thus
committed on the widely extended trade of this nation, under one
pretence or another, as to give a colouring of retributive justice, if
not of moral right, to the recent failures of certain States among us
to pay their debts. Providence singularly avenges all wrongs by its
unerring course; and I doubt not, if the facts could be sifted to the
bottom, it would be found the devil was not permitted to