The Age of Gold

The Age of Gold by H.W. Brands Page B

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Authors: H.W. Brands
similar judgment of the Pitcairners. “A more happy or a more virtuous people it is scarcely possible to imagine the existence of,” he wrote in his account of the voyage.)
    The islanders led the visitors up the cliff to their village. Archer had never seen such a charming place. Rustic cottages provided the little shelter the inhabitants required; each cottage was surrounded by a large cultivated plot teeming with banana, plantain, and breadfruit trees, sugarcane, yams, sweet potatoes, and numerous tropical fruits and vegetables for which Archer had no names. (It was breadfruit, which the British hoped to transplant to their colonies elsewhere in the tropics, that had brought Bligh to the South Pacific on his fateful voyage.) Behind the village rose the slopes of a volcano, upon the peak of which, the islanders said, Fletcher Christian used to sit, awaiting the man-of-war that would come to take him away.
    The islanders were most hospitable, throwing a banquet for their guests and providing overnight accommodations in their homes. The visitors filled their bellies with all the luscious produce they could eat and their bags with all they could buy. Archer’s favorable impression of the islanders was diminished only slightly upon departure the next day. His was the last boat off the island; just as he and Hawkins were boarding, the islander in charge of accounts said that his people had been paid ten dollars too little for some of the supplies. Hawkins, who possessed a trusting heart, and Archer, who had literally given the shirt off his back to his Pitcairn host (European clothes being hard to come by in the South Pacific), assumed that the fault lay with their shipmates, especially after the Pitcairn accountant explained, with much anguish and hand-wringing, that he was a poor man with a large family, and his fellow islanders would hold him responsible for any discrepancy. “This was too touching for us to resist, and we each contributed one half of the sum required to render full justice.” Only after they reached the
Elizabeth Archer
and told their story did they discover that the justice they had rendered was more than full, by ten dollars.Their shipmates got a laugh from the affair, and Archer and Hawkins a lesson in guile in Eden.
    The remainder of the voyage was less eventful. East of Pitcairn the
Elizabeth Archer
encountered the southeast trades, which carried them into the tropics and the doldrums. A ten-day drift ended when they met the northeast trades, which drove them back west of Hawaii. Eventually they entered the belt of North Pacific westerlies, and proceeded before the wind toward California.
    A few hundred miles from land they raised an American vessel. Archer had never met any Americans, and as he was going to their country he was curious to see what they were like. He got his wish when several came aboard. “A very queer-looking lot I thought them, dressed as they were in long blue woollen coats and brown or grey billy-cock hats, and looking more like farmers than sailors,” he wrote. “With true republican freedom, they all accompanied the captain into the cabin, and were regaled with copious supplies of ‘Bass’s Bitter,’ which they seemed to enjoy very much. The talk was animated and plentifully garnished with ‘Do tell,’ ‘Waal, waal,’ ‘I reckon,’ ‘I guess,’ and other Americanisms which I had never heard before, and thought rather expressive and amusing.”
    As interesting to Archer as the Yankees themselves was their vessel, christened the
Mount Vernon
. Her clean lines and aggressive rigging made her much faster in the water than the
Elizabeth Archer
. Archer thought this to be characteristic of the difference between the English and American approaches to sailing. The English built safe, boxy ships that were hard to sink but impossible to sail fast; the Americans sacrificed safety for swiftness, and left the English behind—as the
Mount Vernon
soon left the
Elizabeth

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