When Captain Shaw was coming home—if as I say, it was Shaw—rather to the
surprise of everybody, they made one of the Windward Islands, and lay
off and on for nearly a week. The boys said the officers were sick of
salt-junk, and meant to have turtle-soup before they came home. But after
several days the _Warren_ came to the same rendezvous; they exchanged
signals; she sent to Phillips and these homeward bound men, letters and
papers and told them she was outward-bound, perhaps to the Mediterranean,
and took poor Nolan and his traps on the boat back to try his second
cruise. He looked very blank when he was told to get ready to join her.
He had known enough of the signs of the sky to know that till that moment
he was going “home.” But this was a distinct evidence of something he
had not thought of, perhaps—that there was no going home for him, even
to a prison. And this was the first of some twenty such transfers, which
brought him sooner or later into half our best vessels, but which kept
him all his life at least some hundred miles from the country he had
hoped he might never hear of again.
It may have been on that second cruise—it was once when he was up the
Mediterranean—that Mrs. Graff, the celebrated Southern beauty of those
days, danced with him. They had been lying a long time in the Bay of
Naples, and the officers were very intimate in the English fleet, and
there had been great festivities, and our men thought they must give a
great ball on board the ship. How they ever did it on board the _Warren_
I am sure I do not know. Perhaps it was not the _Warren_, or perhaps
ladies did not take up so much room as they do now. They wanted to use
Nolan’s state-room for something, and they hated to do it without asking
him to the ball; so the captain said they might ask him, if they would be
responsible that he did not talk with the wrong people, “who would give
him intelligence.” So the dance went on, the finest party that had ever
been known, I dare say; for I never heard of a man-of-war ball that was
not. For ladies they had the family of the American consul, one or two
travellers, who had adventured so far, and a nice bevy of English girls
and matrons, perhaps Lady Hamilton herself.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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