The British traveller, Lambert, who visited New York in 1808, described it as resembling a place ravaged by pestilence:[231]-- “The port indeed was full of shipping, but they were dismantled and laid up; their decks were cleared, their hatches fastened down, and scarcely a sailor was to be found on board. Not a box, bale, cask, barrel, or package was to be seen upon the wharves. Many of the counting-houses were shut up, or advertised to be let; and the few solitary merchants, clerks, porters, and laborers that were to be seen were walking about with their hands in their pockets. The coffee-houses were almost empty; the streets, near the water-side, were almost deserted; the grass had begun to grow upon the wharves.” In New England, where the struggle of existence was keenest, the embargo struck like a thunderbolt, and society for a moment thought itself at an end. Foreign commerce and shipping were the life of the people,--the ocean, as Pickering said, was their farm. The outcry of suffering interests became every day more violent, as the public learned that this paralysis was not a matter of weeks, but of months or years. New Englanders as a class were a law-abiding people; but from the earliest moments of their history they had largely qualified their obedience to the law by the violence with which they abused and the ingenuity with which they evaded it. Against the embargo and Jefferson they concentrated the clamor and passion of their keen and earnest nature. Rich and poor, young and old, joined in the chorus; and one lad, barely in his teens, published what he called “The Embargo: a Satire,”--a boyish libel on Jefferson, which the famous poet and Democrat would afterward have given much to recall:-- “And thou, the scorn of every patriot name, Thy country’s ruin, and her councils’ shame. * * * * * Go, wretch! Resign the Presidential chair, Disclose thy secret measures, foul or fair; Go search with curious eye for hornèd frogs ’Mid the wild waste of Louisiana bogs; Or where Ohio rolls his turbid stream Dig for huge bones, thy glory and thy theme.”[232]