The frustration of this high ambition was not the only misfortune to Farragut arising out of the Mexican war. He contracted the yellow fever on the station, nearly losing his life; and subsequently became involved in a controversy with the commodore of the squadron, who he believed had, in the assignment of duty, treated him and his ship with unfair discrimination, due to personal ill-will toward himself. The correspondence had no results; but such quarrels are rarely other than hurtful to the junior officer engaged. It is not singular, therefore, that he speaks of this cruise as the most mortifying of all the service he had seen since entering the navy. "I have little," he said again, "to look back to with satisfaction or pleasure at this time, except the consciousness of having done my duty." Smarting under the belief that he was being imposed upon, he wrote to the Navy Department complaining of injustice, and asking that either he himself should be relieved or the ship sent home. He candidly admits that his letters were considered improper by the Secretary of the Navy, but the Saratoga was ordered to return to the United States, and was paid off at New York in February, 1848. In her short cruise there had been one hundred cases of yellow fever in her crew of one hundred and fifty, and her commander had been obliged, to use his own expression, "to rid the service" of five of her junior officers, and on the last day to bring the first lieutenant to trial for drunkenness. Altogether, the Mexican war and the cruise of the Saratoga seem to have marked the lowest point of disappointment and annoyance that Farragut was called upon to encounter during his naval career. Immediately after leaving the Saratoga, Farragut was again ordered to duty in his former position at the Norfolk navy yard. Two years later he was called to Washington to draw up, in connection with some other officers, a book of Ordnance Regulations for the navy. This occupied him for eighteen months. As when in New Haven, twenty-five years before, he had improved the opportunity of hearing the lectures at Yale College, so at this later period he attended regularly those of the Smithsonian Institution, losing, he records, but a single one. "You will rarely come away from such lectures," he adds, "without being somewhat wiser than you went in." Where precisely such knowledge might come into play he could not, indeed, foresee, but he acted always on the principle that any knowledge might at some time become useful; just as, when at Vera Cruz, though he did not at the time look forward to a war with Mexico, he closely examined every point of interest, for "I have made it a rule of my life to note these things with a view to the possible future."