attendant for me, in the short time allotted for our preparation; and the opportunity of going by that ship was thought too valuable to be lost.  No other ladies happened to be going; so I was consigned to the care of the captain and his crew,—­rough and unaccustomed attendants for a young creature, delicately brought up as I had been; but indeed they did their best to make me not feel the difference.  The unpolished sailors were my nursery-maids and my waiting-women.  Every thing was done by the captain and the men, to accommodate me, and make me easy.  I had a little room made out of the cabin, which was to be considered as my room, and nobody might enter into it.  The first mate had a great character for bravery, and all sailor-like accomplishments; but with all this he had a gentleness of manners, and a pale feminine cast of face, from ill health and a weakly constitution, which subjected him to some little ridicule from the officers, and caused him to be named Betsy.  He did not much like the appellation, but he submitted to it the better, as he knew that those who gave him a woman’s name, well knew that he had a man’s heart, and that in the face of danger he would go as far as any man.  To this young man, whose real name was Charles Atkinson, by a lucky thought of the captain, the care of me was especially entrusted.  Betsy was proud of his charge, and, to do him justice, acquitted himself with great diligence and adroitness through the whole of the voyage.  From the beginning I had somehow looked upon Betsy as a woman, hearing him so spoken of, and this reconciled me in some measure to the want of a maid, which I had been used to.  But I was a manageable girl at all times, and gave nobody much trouble.

I have not knowledge enough to give an account of my voyage, or to remember the names of the seas we passed through, or the lands which we touched upon, in our course.  The chief thing I can remember, for I do not remember the events of the voyage in any order, was Atkinson taking me up on deck, to see the great whales playing about in the sea.  There was one great whale came bounding up out of the sea, and then he would dive into it again, and then would come up at a distance where nobody expected him, and another whale was following after him.  Atkinson said they were at play, and that that lesser whale loved that bigger whale, and kept it company all through the wide seas:  but I thought it strange play, and a frightful kind of love; for I every minute expected they would come up to our ship and toss it.  But Atkinson said a whale was a gentle creature, and it was a sort of sea-elephant, and that the most powerful creatures in nature are always the least hurtful.  And he told me how men went out to take these whales, and stuck long, pointed darts into them; and how the sea was discoloured with the blood of these poor whales for many miles distance:  and I admired at the courage of the men, but I was sorry for the inoffensive whale.  Many other pretty sights he used to shew