MY SEA-FARING FAMILY
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The MARIA cruised Japan and the coast of Chili and Peru. Charles worked himself up to be boatsteerer during the voyage and, when the ship returned to port, he was proud to be classed a boatsteerer at the age of eighteen years. One of the experiences which Charles told many years later was about Wake Island. Nantucket whale ships had landed at Wake Island before 1851. It was on this voyage that Charles landed on this island in 1830. It was his recollection that the island lay along 19 degrees No. Lat. and 165 Long, east from Greenwich and says it was a small coral island with a lagoon on one side of it. Nothing but mangrove trees and snakes upon it. He walked across the island in less than half an hour. Another experience he told years later at the Pacific Club was that in 1829 on this same voyage that he landed at the port of San Francisco and found there a Nantucket chap and also Obed Swain, Henry Plaskett and David Hussey, all Nantucket boys who were there on different ships. They were all on liberty ashore and visited the Old Mission, which in 1888 was in the heart of the city. There were then in 1829 only a few adobe huts where great emporiums of the Pacific now hold sway. It was just 59 years later, in 1888, that this story was told as the old Captains sat around the stove in the "Captains Room". The MARIA arrived in port on the 24th day of April, 1832, with 1980 bbls. of sperm oil and 21 bbls. of whale oil, a very good voyage. Up to this time Charles had very little schooling and he was now eager to get some education, so he studied diligently for the next few months, going to school with other boys of his age and earnestly hoping he could fit himself to be a navigator, which was the height of his ambition and for which he had an instinctive urge. Thus ended Charles' second voyage whaling.
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