n elder brother William, who
had received a midshipman's warrant a short time before, he promptly
decided to accept an offer which held forth to him the same brilliant
prospects. The arrangement was soon concluded. Porter promised to be to
him always a friend and guardian; and the admiral wrote in after life,
"I am happy to have it in my power to say, with feelings of the warmest
gratitude, that he ever was to me all that he promised." The boy
returned to New Orleans with his new protector, in whose house he
thenceforth resided, making occasional trips across Lake Pontchartrain
to a plantation which his father had purchased on the Pascagoula River.
A few months later Commander Porter appears to have made a visit to
Washington on business connected with the New Orleans station, and to
have taken Farragut with him to be placed at school, for which there
were few advantages at that time in Louisiana. The boy then took what
proved to be a last farewell of his father. George Farragut continued to
live in Pascagoula, and there he died on the 4th of June, 1817, in his
sixty-second year.

The trip north was made by Porter and his ward in the bomb-ketch
Vesuvius, a stop being made at Havana; where the commander had business
growing out of the seizure by him in the Mississippi River of some
French privateers, for which both Spain and the United States had
offered a reward. At Havana the lad heard of an incident, only too
common in those days, which set his heart, as those of his countrymen
were fast being set, against Great Britain. Presuming confidently upon
the naval weakness of the United States, and arguing from their long
forbearance that insults to the flag would be indefinitely borne for the
sake of the profitable commerce which neutrality insured, Great Britain,
in order to support the deadly struggle in which she was engaged with
France, had endeavored to shut off the intercourse of her enemy with the
rest of the world, by imposing upon neutral trade restrictions before
unheard of and without justification in accepted international law. Both
the justice and policy of these restrictions were contested by a large
party of distinguished Englishmen; but upon another principle men of all
parties in the old country were practically agreed, and that was the
right of the British Government to compel the services of British seamen
wherever found. From this grew the claim, which few Englishmen then
dared to disavow, that their shi