gers and such of the crew who had not enlisted on the Georgia to Pernambuco, the nearest port, and left them stranded there while he went on to Boston with the provisions. The wife of the captain of the Constitution could not have suffered from want, as a few months afterwards we saw in a newspaper an interview in which she gave a very uncomplimentary account of her experiences with the pirates, but consoled herself by saying that she had saved from their clutches sixteen thousand dollars in gold of the ship's money by sewing the coins into her petticoats and safely left the corsair with her treasure. When we read this we felt that we had been robbed! Before leaving Trinidad we slipped the Constitution's cable, set her on fire, and turned her adrift; we then made a target of her and exercised our men at the guns—and mighty poor range-finders and gun-pointers they proved themselves to be.
On July 9 we overhauled a magnificent ship with towering masts and auxiliary steam power—the Kent from London bound to Australia. After perfunctorily looking at the ship's papers the captain offered me a glass of sherry, and when I went on the deck the passengers crowded around me, eagerly asking if my ship was the famous Alabama. Of course I told them yes, and answered a thousand other questions. One of the passengers made particular inquiries about my age, and when I was about to get into our boat he presented me with a brown paper bag full of most delicious cakes, a luxury I had not tasted for many a long day. I met this gentleman again twenty-odd years after the cake incident.
I lived the simple life on board the Georgia at this time owing to the fact that we had not entered a port where anything could be bought for so long a time. I only had my ship's ration of salt horse and hard tack to eat, but it must have been a healthful regimen as I had grown wonderfully in height and strength—and my sobriquet of "Little Morgan" had become a misnomer.
