Page 22 - bonsal_efbeale1912

6 Edward Fitzgerald Beale

historian. Few youngsters have been entrusted
with secret missions, still fewer have proved so
reticent as to carry the secret to their grave, yet
this was the case with our young Acting Master.
Little is known of the episode beyond the
general tradition in the service, of which I shall
speak later, and for this I am indebted to Rear-
Admiral Harmony and Rear-Admiral Upshur,
Beale s shipmates, who happily survive. We must
also do what we can with the information which the
Reverend Walter Colton, the Chaplain of the Con
gress, supplied in his book descriptive of this cruise,
which was published in New York in 1850 under
the title of Deck and Port. One month out from
Hampton Roads he makes this entry in his log:

We discovered this morning a brig on our weather bow,
standing down for us, and we hove to with our main topsail
to the mast. She ran up Danish colors and in an hour
hove to at a cable s length under our lee-quarter. We
lowered a boat and boarded her. She proved to be the
brig Maria, forty days out from Rio Grande in Brazil, and
bound for Antwerp. The Captain wished to correct his
reckoning, and well he might, for he was seven days out of
his longitude. Mr. Beale, our second Master, took passage
in her for the United States with despatches. It was
arranged between him and the Captain of the brig that he
should be put on board the first vessel that they might fall
in with bound for an American port, and that if they fell in
with none, that he should be landed at Dover, England.

As a matter of fact, the Maria sailed for many
weeks through an empty ocean, and without meet-