to the plague-stricken city.

The officers of the United States squadron passed a gay winter in
Messina in 1819. Farragut was not yet eighteen years of age, but his
bodily development had kept pace with his mental, and he writes that he
always held his own at this time in all athletic exercises. The
succeeding spring and summer were again spent in routine cruising on
board the Franklin, seventy-four, which had taken the place of the
Washington. In the fall of 1819 the squadron was in Gibraltar; and
there, "after much opposition," Farragut was appointed an acting
lieutenant on board the brig Shark. This promotion, coming at so early
an age, he afterward looked upon as one of the most important events of
his life. "It caused me to feel that I was now associated with men, on
an equality, and must act with more circumspection. When I became first
lieutenant, my duties were still more important, for in truth I was
really commander of the vessel, and yet I was not responsible (as
such)--an anomalous position which has spoiled some of our best
officers. I consider it a great advantage to obtain command young,
having observed, as a general rule, that persons who come into authority
late in life shrink from responsibility, and often break down under its
weight." This last sentence, coming from a man of such extensive
observation, and who bore in his day the responsibility of such weighty
decisions, deserves most serious consideration now, when command rank is
reached so very late in the United States Navy.

After a short year in the Shark Farragut was ordered to return to the
United States, to pass the examination required of all midshipmen before
they could be confirmed to the rank of lieutenant. No opportunity
offering for passage in a ship-of-war, he embarked in a merchant vessel
called the America. On the passage he found himself, with the ship,
confronted by an apparent danger, which occasioned a display of the
fearlessness and energy always latent in his character. Those were days
when piracy was rife upon the seas in the neighborhood of the West
Indies and of the Spanish Main. The system was an outgrowth of the
privateering carried on by French and Spanish marauders, for they were
little better, against both British and neutral commerce during the wars
of the French Revolution and Empire; and it had received a fresh impulse
from the quarrel then existing between Spain and her American colonies,
which since 1810 had been