nior officer engaged. It is not singular, therefore,
that he speaks of this cruise as the most mortifying of all the service
he had seen since entering the navy. "I have little," he said again, "to
look back to with satisfaction or pleasure at this time, except the
consciousness of having done my duty." Smarting under the belief that he
was being imposed upon, he wrote to the Navy Department complaining of
injustice, and asking that either he himself should be relieved or the
ship sent home. He candidly admits that his letters were considered
improper by the Secretary of the Navy, but the Saratoga was ordered to
return to the United States, and was paid off at New York in February,
1848. In her short cruise there had been one hundred cases of yellow
fever in her crew of one hundred and fifty, and her commander had been
obliged, to use his own expression, "to rid the service" of five of her
junior officers, and on the last day to bring the first lieutenant to
trial for drunkenness. Altogether, the Mexican war and the cruise of the
Saratoga seem to have marked the lowest point of disappointment and
annoyance that Farragut was called upon to encounter during his naval
career.

Immediately after leaving the Saratoga, Farragut was again ordered to
duty in his former position at the Norfolk navy yard. Two years later he
was called to Washington to draw up, in connection with some other
officers, a book of Ordnance Regulations for the navy. This occupied him
for eighteen months. As when in New Haven, twenty-five years before, he
had improved the opportunity of hearing the lectures at Yale College, so
at this later period he attended regularly those of the Smithsonian
Institution, losing, he records, but a single one. "You will rarely come
away from such lectures," he adds, "without being somewhat wiser than
you went in." Where precisely such knowledge might come into play he
could not, indeed, foresee, but he acted always on the principle that
any knowledge might at some time become useful; just as, when at Vera
Cruz, though he did not at the time look forward to a war with Mexico,
he closely examined every point of interest, for "I have made it a rule
of my life to note these things with a view to the possible future."

When the Ordnance Regulations were finished, in the spring of 1852,
Farragut was again assigned to the Norfolk navy yard, and directed to
utilize the experience he had gained in compiling them by giving weekly