The "distinguished gentlemen" at Washington who particularly aided Audubon at this time, besides Colonel Abert, were Edward Everett, Levi Woodbury, Secretary of the Navy, and Lewis McLane, Secretary of the Treasury. He was particularly anxious to obtain accommodation for his party aboard a government vessel, but it was some time before a suitable one was available. They left Washington about October 15, 1831, and went by steamer to Norfolk and Richmond, Virginia, where the Governor, John Floyd, whom Audubon had known in his Kentucky days, gave him numerous letters of introduction. At Charleston, their next stopping-place, he had hardly begun work in the field when he was sought out by the Rev. John Bachman, by inclination a naturalist of the old school and by profession a Lutheran minister, who at once took the whole party under his hospitable roof, where they remained a month. Thus began a life-long and almost ideal friendship between these two men, so unlike in character, in temperament and in training, which was quite as important to the modest German-American divine as to the impulsive Franco-American painter and student of birds. It was Audubon's infectious enthusiasm which kindled to an ardent flame that love of nature which was innate in Bachman, and which eventually brought his name and work to the attention of the scientific world. Audubon remained at Charleston with the Bachmans until November 15, when the opportunity which they had awaited came suddenly, and they sailed for St. Augustine, Florida, on the government schooner _Agnes_. On that day Bachman wrote to Mrs. Audubon, in compliance "with a request of your kind and worthy husband, who laid an injunction on me this morning":[3]