1846 EQUIPMENT OF A SURVEYING SHIP 



SI 



Again, p. 100: 



It is necessary to be provided with books of reference, which 

 are ruinously expensive to a private individual, though a mere 

 dewdrop in the general cost of the fitting out of a ship, espe- 

 cially as they might be kept in store, and returned at the end of 

 a commission, like other stores. A hundred pounds would have 

 well supplied the Rattlesnake ; but she sailed without a volume, 

 an application made by her captain not having been attended to. 



P. 103 : 



Of all those who were actively engaged upon the survey, the 

 young commander alone was destined by inevitable fate to be 

 robbed of his just reward. Care and anxiety, from the mobility 

 of his temperament, sat not so lightly upon him as they might 

 have done, and this, joined to the physical debility produced by 

 the enervating climate of New Guinea, fairly wore him out, 

 making him prematurely old before much more than half of 

 the allotted span was completed. But he died in harness, the end 

 attained, the work that lay before him honourably done. Which 

 of us may dare to ask for more ? He has raised an enduring 

 monument in his works, and his epitaph shall be the grateful 

 thanks of many a mariner threading his way among the mazes 

 of the Coral Sea. 



P. 104: 



The world enclosed within the timbers of a man-of-war is a 

 most remarkable community, hardly to be rendered vividly 

 intelligible to the mere landsman in these days of constitutional 

 government and freedom of the press. 



Then follows a vigorous sketch of sea life from Cha- 

 misso, suggesting that the type of one's relation to the cap- 

 tain is to be found in Jean Paul's Biography of the Twins, 

 who were united back to back. This sketch Huxley en- 

 forces by a passage from the imaginary journal aforesaid, 

 " indited apparently when the chains were yet new and 

 somewhat galled the writer," to judge from which " little 

 alteration would seem to have taken place in nautical life " 

 since Chamisso's voyage, thirty years before. 



You tell me (he writes), that you sigh for my life of freedom 

 and adventure ; and that, compared with mine, the conventional 

 monotony of your own stinks in your nostrils. My dear fellow. 



