Under any conditions it is interesting to watch the loading of a large sailing ship, and when you are going to sea in that ship, a certain degree of interest seems to attach itself to each article, and the assortment of freight was bewildering. In a couple of hours, one morning when I was on board, there came down in rapid succession two large boilers for Spreckles’s sugar refinery in Honolulu, several hundred cases of starch, ditto kegs of nails, two wagon-loads of sewing-machines, two hundred bales of oakum, and four very large whale-boats, about thirty-five feet long, going out to Sitka. Strange that they can not or do not build good whale-boats on the Pacific coast; the best boats used by our whalers are all built in New Bedford, even down to the present time, and sent out to Alaska round the Horn. It will be easily perceived how difficult it must be to stow a cargo of this sort so that in the heaviest of weather it will not shift. Imagine packing away four clumsy boats in a ship’s hold so that they will not be crushed by heavier objects, and yet in such a way as to prevent these very objects from shifting. If the various articles could be delivered on the pier to suit the stevedores, it would be plain sailing; but everything must be taken as it comes, and it calls for the greatest skill from the most experienced men. There is said to be only a single firm of this sort in New York whose men understand perfectly the art of stowing the cargo of a deep-water ship. For several days we were tortured on the rack of expectation; but after the most aggravating delays and daily messages from the owners that the ship “would positively go to sea to-morrow,” we learned one Monday morning that the ship would be cleared that day and would sail the next morning, which was +May 11+