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Notes on the West Indies, vol. 1 of 2 cover

Notes on the West Indies, vol. 1 of 2

Chapter 15: LETTER XI.
By George Pinckard
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About This Book

The author offers a series of epistolary travel notes describing a voyage to and experiences in the Caribbean, blending shipboard episodes and port sketches with observations on climate, disease—particularly seasoning or yellow fever—and colonial society. The narrative documents encounters with Creole communities, enslaved people, and indigenous groups of South America, and includes reflections on slavery, colonial administration, military hospitals, and everyday life ashore. The second edition incorporates additional letters from Martinique, Jamaica, and Saint-Domingue and broadens commentary on public health and slavery, maintaining an episodic, immediate style that favors contemporaneous impressions over systematic analysis.

LETTER XI.

Lord Sheffield, Dec. 8.

Again I have been unsettled, and moving about from place to place, making my home sometimes on board, sometimes on shore. On examining my baggage, soon after I joined the Lord Sheffield, I perceived that one of my boxes was missing; and it has cost me a long, and a very sickly round, to recover it. In following the Ulysses, which had changed her birth, we were brought into an open and heavy-swelling sea, the motion of which made me very unwell, and led me to contemplate the probable sufferings I shall have to support upon the long voyage we are about to undertake.

Capt. Jaffray never having been on board a ship of such immense bulk, availed himself of my necessities, and took the command of the boat, upon this excursion, in order to look at the vast Commerce de Marseilles. I wish it were practicable to convey to you, in words, the sense of grandeur with which the mind is inspired on first approaching such an enormous floating battery; or to paint to you the sensations excited by rowing, in a small boat, close below her stern, and her sides; but it were quite impossible for the pen to describe how diminutive we felt, or how immense and wonderful she appeared. To express it by the image of the gnat and the camel, it were necessary to suppose the former the minutest of its race, and the latter hugely overgrown. Looking up from our little skiff, the sight was truly awful; the figure of the ship was forgotten; the hull appeared a mountain, the masts lofty obelisks erected upon it; and the tremendous batteries, projecting from her sides, conveyed the idea of a stupendous rock hanging over us, fortified with many tiers of cannon.

We returned, yesterday, to the Lord Sheffield, and you will be glad to know that we were accompanied by doctor Cleghorn, who, in consequence of a new arrangement, is permitted to join our mess; so that we have again the prospect of crossing the Atlantic pleasantly en quartette.

To-day a signal has been made for the fleet to unmoor; and, in consequence of this, the Lord Sheffield has dropped down from the Mother-bank to the eastern part of Spithead. Should the wind continue at the point from which it now blows, we may be to-morrow on our passage.