ht at our own suggestion.
It would have been better to have taken the advice of some experienced
shipmaster: it might have cost us less, and we should afterwards have
fared better, to have done so.

I remember that we took along a lot of confectioneries, both for our
own delectation and also to "treat" the Esquimaux on! That was a wild
shot. As well offer an Esquimau cold boiled parsnip as a stick of
candy. We also had two boxes of lemons! Which of us was responsible
for the proposition for lemonade in Hudson Straits has never been
satisfactory settled. We none of us _can remember_ how the lemons came
on board. Wade says they were bought as an antidote for sea-sickness.
A far more sensible article of traffic was twenty dollars' worth of
iron in small bars; four dozen large jack-knives; twenty
butcher-knives, and the same number of hatchets. We had also a web of
red flannel at twenty dollars; in all, ninety dollars.

For mattresses, blankets, "comforters," and buffalo-skins, there was
expended the sum of a hundred and twenty-three dollars. Ten
Springfield rifles at ten dollars each (bought at an auction-sale),
with a quantity of cartridges, one hundred and twelve dollars. For an
old six-pound howitzer, purchased by Capt. Mazard from a schooner
supposed to have been engaged in the slave-trade, nineteen dollars;
and for ammunition (powder, iron shot, and a lot of small bullets),
thirty-seven dollars.

For firing at seals or bears from the deck of the schooner, we had
made, at Messrs, R. & Co.'s machine-shop, a large rifle of about an
inch bore, and set like a miniature cannon in a wrought-iron frame,
arranged with a swivel for turning it, and a screw for elevating or
depressing the muzzle. This novel weapon was, as I must needs own, one
of my projection, and was always a subject for raillery from my
comrades. Its cost, including the mounting, was ninety-seven dollars.
In all, three hundred and eighty-eight dollars.

Then there were other bills, including the cost of several nautical
telescopes, also ice-anchors, ice-chisels, sounding-line, hawsers,
&c., to the sum of a hundred and three dollars.

The lumber and carpenter work on "The Curlew" at Portland made a bill
of a hundred and nine dollars; seamen's wages to Gloucester, with
car-fare back, nineteen dollars; bracing and strengthening the
schooner, sixty-seven dollars; cost of getting in fuel and water,
thirty-three dollars; and other bills to the amount of forty-