A Sloop-Journey Down the Hudson

1825

One evening, when I was about five years old, my good mother called me to her from the dooryard, where I had been playing, and I ran to her side. As I say, it was evening, but that made no difference with me: I could play in the night as well as daytime, and had no trouble in reaching her side, whether the candles were lighted or not. There were no kerosene lamps then, and people in the country had to depend for their light upon candles, made by dipping a wick of cotton repeatedly in melted tallow, until enough of it clung to the wick to make a “body” for the apparatus; and when that was lighted it did not illuminate a house to any great extent.

Well, my dear mother called me to her side, and said: “Fanny, I am going to take you on a little journey. We shall travel first in a wagon, till we come to the bank of a beautiful river, with mountains on each side of it; then In Pursuit of Sight.

we shall get into a sail-boat and sail south for many miles; then we shall come to a great city, larger than anything of which you have ever heard or thought, and stay there for several days; and then home again.”

The idea of taking a journey filled me with joy, and I danced about the room with perhaps not enough attention to the furniture that kept getting in the way; but my transports were somewhat modified, when she explained the object of the expedition — to have a surgical operation performed upon my eyes. “There may be some pain with it, Fanny,” she explained: “but you are willing to bear it, are you not?”

I already knew what pain was: — it is, alas! one of the first things we learn in life! and I shrank a little at the idea of any of it being inflicted upon me. “But, Fanny,” my mother explained, “perhaps it will result in giving you your sight: so that you can see everything that is around you, and play with the rest of the children exactly as they do, study pretty pictures, and read interesting books, and enjoy yourself in a hundred ways that you do not, as your eyes are now.” Then I was happy again.

This was in 1825; and you may readily believe that means of communication were not many and varied, in those days. There was not even a stage from our home or from near there, to any point upon the Hudson River.

We started one morning before the early dawn was in the skies, and rode in a market-wagon to Sing Sing, on the Hudson, where we were to take a sloop for New York; steamboats were still very few and far between. This musically-named town, in which I thought every one, probably, belonged to the choir, was then a small country hamlet, straggling along the banks of the river — with no idea that it would ever bear such a prominent part in the punishment of the malefactors of a great commonwealth.

So at four o’clock in the soft dawn of that summer morning, we unfurled our sails, and went rushing down the river toward the great metropolis. It is perhaps needless to say that the novel experience was a delight to me: I was all over the deck, and soon, I may safely say, in the good graces of everybody aboard. I could not of course view the beautiful scenery through which we were passing; but there were plenty of friends to describe it to me, and 1 enjoyed it upon the whole as much perhaps as if I could have seen, and as if I had had to depend entirely upon my own powers of observation. I have always delighted in passing through beautiful scenery, and, indeed, enjoyed the sensation of traveling — perhaps more than some that can see; and I find that other blind people are the same in this respect.

My poor mother was at times seasick, or, more accurately expressing it, river-sick: but I kept well, and after knowing that she was comfortable in her berth, and being told that nobody ever died of that kind of sickness, and that she would be all the better for it soon, I was the gayest of the gay; and Captain Green A Popular Child-Vocalist.

immediately adopted me as “first mate of the sloop.” I was, I believe, called a fairly pretty child; and my black curls and frisky manners did not detract from the five-year-old disposition that developed in me, to be the belle of the company.

The dear old Captain pretended to discover that I was a great vocalist; and at times kept me busy singing all the little songs I had gathered up since old enough to learn and understand them. These were not very many or particularly deep; but they served. One of them I remember inaugurated itself with the following impressive lines, sung to a famous patriotic air:

“I wish I was a Yankee’s wife,
And then I would have somethin’:

Every fall an ear of corn,

And now and then a pumkin!”

I felt, even then, that there was something a little irregular in the rhyming of this stanza: but the Captain pretended to hold my song particularly in very high esteem, and whenever he was a little blue, called me to him and coaxed or hired me to sing it. With the usual thrift of the accomplished cantatrice, I gradually increased my prices as the article grew more and more in dem; nd; and was very much disappointed when, a,’ er gliding through the beautiful Highlands and past the impressive palisades, we arrived in the Big City.

It was early in the morning when we landed, having been twenty-four hours in making the trip from Sing Sing — a journey that I have frequently performed since, by railroad, in fifty-five minutes.

We went to the house of a friend who bore the good old name of Jacob Smith, at No. lo Roosevelt Street, a very fine place at that time; and soon we were in the presence of the famous Dr. Valentine Mott. 1 felt that Dr. Mott had a kind, pleasant face: singularly enough I have always been able to form a pretty accurate opinion of a countenance, by the voice that proceeded from it.

Being but a little child, to whom one of God’s creatures was abouit the same as another, except as they pleased or displeased me, I did not stand so much in awe of the great Dr. Mott; but my mother did, and listened with bated breath to hear what he should say of my case. It was not the first time that poor mortals had hung upon his words; for he was even then considered the foremost surgeon of his time. He occupied the chair of surgery in Columbia College, and had performed operations that no other practitioner ever dared to undertake. He had, seven years before, placed a ligature around the brachiocephalic trunk, or arteria innominata, only two inches from the heart, for aneurism of the right sub-clavian artery; and that for the first time in the history of surgery. To be sure the patient died within a month; but with the comforting assurance that he had had something done to him with a knife, that no other patient No Hope for my Eyes.

had ever experienced. And as this was before the age of chloroform, or any other very effective ansesthetics, death must certainly have been a relief.

Well, Dr. Mott and another celebrated surgeon at that time, named Dr. Delafield, examined my eyes and told my tearfully-listening mother, that there was no hope for them: malpractice had spoiled them. And so we returned to our country home — taking the same sloop and the same market-wagon as those in which we had come.

The poor doctor who had spoiled my eyes, soon disappeared from the neighborhood; and we never heard any more about him. He is probably dead, before this time; but if I could ever meet him, I would tell him that he unwittmgly did me the greatest favor in the world.

I was more thoughtful and sad on the way back up the river: the great doctor had not been above placing his fatherly hand on my head, and saying, “Poor little girl!” and that touch of sympathy went with me as I journeyed homeward. Hour after hour, when I had crept into my little “bunk” on the sloop, I heard the dear waves of the river singing to me, and telling me not to be discouraged. “Fanny, be brave! Fanny, be brave!” they seemed to say: “brighter days will come yet!”

And, indeed, they were coming: although from what direction I did not then know. But I never lost my faith in the great Father above; I knew that the river-waves were His, and that I had heard His voice.