It was a work of difficulty and danger to descend from the deck-load to the forecastle; but to reach the foretop required only a hop, skip, and a jump.

The locomotive qualities of this craft, misnamed the Dolphin, were little superior to those of a well constructed raft; and with a fresh breeze on the quarter, in spite of the skill of the best helmsman, her wake was as crooked as that of the "wounded snake," referred to by the poet, which "dragged its slow length along." It was in the early part of July, in the year 1809, that the brig Dolphin left Portsmouth, bound on a voyage to Dutch Guiana, which at that time, in consequence of the malignant fevers that prevailed on the coast, was not inaptly termed "the grave of American seamen." The crew consisted of the captain and mate, five sailors, a green hand to act as cook, and a cabin boy.

There was also a passenger on board, a young man named Chadwick, who had been residing in Portsmouth, and was going to Demarara, in the hope which fortunately for him was not realized of establishing himself in a mercantile house.
The forecastle being, for obvious reasons, untenable during the outward passage, these ten individuals, when below deck, were stowed away in the cabin and steerage, amid boxes, bales, chests, barrels, and water casks, in a manner somewhat miscellaneous, and not the most commodious or comfortable.

Indeed, for several days after we left port, the usual and almost only access to the cabin was by the skylight; and those who made the cabin their home, were obliged to crawl on all fours over the heterogeneous mass of materials with which it was crowded, in order to reach their berths! The owners of the brig must have calculated largely on favorable weather during the passage; for had we experienced a gale on the coast, or fallen in with the tail-end of a hurricane in the tropics, the whole deck-load would have been swept away, and the lives of the ship's company placed in imminent peril.

The weather, however, proved remarkably mild, and the many inconveniences to which the crew were subjected were borne with exemplary patience, and sometimes even regarded as a capital joke.
We passed the Whale's Back at the mouth of the Piscataqua, and the Isles of Shoals loomed up through the hazy atmosphere; and although the wind was light, and the sea apparently smooth, the brig began to have a motion an awkward, uneasy motion for which I could not account, and which, to my great annoyance, continued to increase as we left the land.
I staggered as I crossed the quarter-deck, and soon after we cleared the harbor, came near pitching overboard from the platform covering the sheep-pens.