BIRDS OF THE CAMBRIDGE REGION. 



77 



Townsend's Narrative shows that in October, 1835, Nuttall was making his 

 second voyage from the Cohmibia River to the Sandwich Islands/ while Richard 

 H. Dana's ' Two Years before the Mast ' contains entries ^ which make it abso- 

 lutely certain that Nuttall sailed with Dana from San Diego, California, on May 

 8, 1836, in the 'Alert,' and that, after rounding Cape Horn, they landed 

 together in Boston on the 21st of the following September. 



Dana's account of his meeting with Nuttall in California is most amusing. 

 He says : " I had left him quietly seated in the chair of Botany and Ornithology, 

 in Harvard University ; and the ne.xt I saw of him, was strolling about San 

 Diego beach, in a sailor's pea-jacket, with a wide straw hat, and barefooted, with 

 his trousers rolled up to his knees, picking up stones and shells .... he came 

 down to the boat, in the rig I have described, with his shoes in his hand, and 

 his pockets full of specimens." The second mate of the ' Pilgrim ' had de- 

 scribed him to Dana before this as " a 'sort of an oldish man,' with white hair, 

 and spent all his time in the bush, and along the beach, picking up flowers and 

 shells, and such truck, and had a dozen boxes and barrels, full of them." The 

 sailors nicknamed him " ' Old Curious,' from his zeal for curiosities, and some of 

 them said that he was crazy, and that his friends let him go about and amuse 

 himself in this way One of them, however, an old salt, who had seen some- 

 thing more of the world ashore, set all to rights, as he thought, ' Oh, 'vast 



there ! — You don't know anything about them craft. I 've seen them colleges, 

 and know the ropes. They keep all such things for cur'osities, and study 'em, 

 and have men a' purpose to go and get 'em. This old chap knows what he 's 

 about. He a'n't the child you take him for. He '11 carry all these things to the 

 college, and if they are better than any that they have had before, he '11 be head 

 of the college. Then, by-and-by, somebody else will go after some more, and 

 if they beat him, he '11 have to go again, or else give up his berth. That 's the 

 way they do it. This old covey knows the ropes.' " ^ 



When the 'Alert' was off "the island of Staten Land, just to the east- 

 ward of Cape Horn Mr. N. said he should like to go ashore upon the island 



and e.\amine a spot which probably no human being had ever set foot upon ; but 



the captain intimated that he would seethe island — specimens and all, in — 



another place, before he would get out a boat or delay the ship one moment for 

 him." * 



' J. K. Townsend, Narrative of a Journey across the Rocky Mountains, to the Columbia Rivt 

 '839. 233- 



' [R. H. Dana, Jr.], Two Years before the Mast, 1840, 347 et seq. 

 ' Ibid., 359, 360, 361. 

 * Ibid., 412, 413. 



