work, as there were only six hours in the twenty-four
during which boats could reach the ship, and those six hours were from
eleven o'clock P.M. to five in the morning. At all other times the
ship lay on her beam-ends, and the water around her was too shallow to
float even a plank. To add, if possible, to our difficulties and to
our anxiety, the weather became suddenly colder, the thermometer fell
to zero, masses of floating ice came in with every tide and tore off
great sheets of the vessel's copper as they drifted past, and the
river soon became so choked up with icy fragments that we were obliged
to haul the boats back and forth with ropes. In spite of weather,
water, and ice, however, the vessel's cargo was slowly but steadily
discharged, and by the 10th of October nothing remained on board
except a few hogsheads of flour, some salt-beef and pork which we
did not want, and seventy-five or a hundred tons of coal. These we
determined to let her carry back to San Francisco as ballast. The
tides were now getting successively higher and higher every day, and
on the 11th the _Palmetto_ floated for the first time in almost three
weeks. As soon as her keel cleared the bar she was swung around into
the channel, head to sea, and moored with light kedge-anchors, ready
for a start on the following day. Since the intensely cold weather of
the previous week, her crew of negroes had expressed no further
desire to spend a winter in Siberia, and, unless the wind should veer
suddenly to the southward, we could see nothing to prevent her from
getting safely out of the river. The wind for once proved favourable,
and at 2 P.M. on the 12th of October the _Palmetto_ shook out her
long-furled courses and topsails, cut the cables of her kedge-anchors,
and with a light breeze from the north-east, moved slowly out into the
gulf. Never was music more sweet to my ears than the hearty "Yo heave
ho!" of her negro crew as they sheeted home the topgallant sails
outside the bar! The bark was safely at sea. She was not a day too
soon in making her escape. In less than a week after her departure,
the river and the upper part of the gulf were so packed with ice that
it would have been impossible for her to move or to avoid total wreck.

The prospects of the enterprise at the opening of the second winter
were more favourable than they had been at any time since its
inception. The Company's vessels, it is true, had been very late in
their arrival, and o