“camels.” They were vessels capable of receiving a whale-ship and floating it over the bar. They were to be made broad, of shallow draught, with air-tight compartments. These machines were to be taken outside the bar; the compartments were to be filled with water and the camels sunk. The whale ship was then to be floated over the camel and the water was then to be pumped out of the compartments when the camel would rise with the ship on its back and carry the whaler into the harbor.
The scheme seemed a wild one, but opinions were controlled by party feeling. The bill passed, the camels were built, and the scheme failed as a practical measure. Nantucket was doomed as a trading and commercial town. As a watering place it had a future. In one of the debates upon corporations Robinson took part, perhaps upon the Nantucket “camel” question, and made the best speech to which I have ever listened in defense of the system.
The corporation system has yielded larger returns to Massachusetts than she has received from any other feature of her domestic policy, excepting only her system of public instruction.
Robinson lived, probably, on the verge of insanity, to which end he came finally. When a member of the House, he was restless, almost constantly walking in the area or through the aisles, running his hands through his long black hair, engaged apparently in meditation upon topics outside of the business of the House.
He is immortalized in Lowell’s “Biglow Papers,”
“John P. Robinson, he
“Says he won’t vote for Governor B.”
The Governor B. was Governor George N. Briggs, with whom Robinson had a quarrel about the year 1845.
Henry Wilson, afterwards Senator and Vice-President of the United States, was a member of the House in 1842 and
