i82 LOUIS AGASS1Z. [CIIAI-. xxn. 



resist the desire for an investigation directed by himself 

 in person. 



His friend, Professor Benjamin Pierce, had succeeded 

 Professor Bache as Director of the United States Coast 

 Survey, and an expedition was easily arranged under 

 his supervision. Frank de Pourtales, who had passed 

 the last five years in deep-sea dredgings for the Survey, 

 was naturally put in charge of the apparatus for sound- 

 ing and hauling the net from the bottom of the sea. A 

 new steamer, built especially under the direction of the 

 navy officer, Captain C. P. Patterson, chief hydrographer 

 of the Coast Survey, and named the Hasslcr in hon- 

 our of a Swiss mathematician of Aarau and the first 

 director of the Coast Survey, was fitted for the voyage. 

 It was a small steamer of three hundred and fifty tons, 

 rigged as a three-masted schooner, one hundred and 

 sixty-five feet long, twenty-five feet beam, ten feet 

 depth of hold, and with a draught seven and a half 

 feet forward and ten feet aft ; but it was too hastily 

 and imperfectly finished by the contractor, and was not 

 a proper vessel for a long voyage. The compound 

 engines, with double cylinders, the same used at that 

 time on the White Star Line Company's transatlantic 

 steamers, were unfit, and ought never to have been 

 accepted. A lack of oversight, during the construc- 

 tion and at the reception of the little steamer, marred 

 the whole expedition from its start until its arrival at 

 San Francisco. It was a great, almost a cruel, care- 

 lessness to embark a man so distinguished, so old, and 

 so much an invalid as Agassiz was, in an unseaworthy 

 craft, sailing under the United States flag. 



