In going from Petersburg to Norfolk, I was first taken, with two cars full of other people, to City Point, where we were all discharged under a dirty shed, from which projected a wharf into the James River. After waiting an hour, sitting on a pile of baggage upon the wharf, or, when it rained, walking up and down the dirty shed, I ventured to ask what we were waiting for? For a steamboat to take us down the river. What is the cause of her detention? Oh, there was no detention no — more than usual, yet; it was about time for her to be along now, I was answered. After waiting an hour and twenty-five minutes, having had a “hasty” breakfast before the usual time in Petersburg, that we might take this train, the boat did come, and this is what they call a “connection.” Nobody showed any surprise, or seemed to have any objection to the arrangement, though it must have been exceedingly disagreeable to the ladies, who had not even a chair or a clean bench to sit upon, and one would suppose might be a little provoking to the men of business.

The shores of the James River are low and level—the scenery uninteresting; but frequent planters’ mansions, often of great size and of some elegance, stand upon the bank, and sometimes these have pretty and well-kept grounds about them—finer than any other I have seen at the South—and the plantations surrounding them are cultivated with neatness and skill. Many men distinguished in law and politics here have their homes.

I arrived in Norfolk on the eve of a terrific gale, during which vessels went down at their anchors in the Roads, and the City and Country were much excited by various disasters, both on shore and at sea.

Several men-of-war were waiting at the Navy-Yard for crews, and the officers were in great trouble from the difficulty experienced in getting men. What crews the ships are and must be manned with, you may imagine, when the highest wages the law allows to be paid are $12 a month, and merchantmen are paying $25 for able seamen.

And, at the same time, the usual means of discipline are forbidden to be exercised. I am the last man that would advocate a return to the cat, and the old terrifying discipline. I would not, because I believe that it is good policy to train, even at great temporary inconvenience and expense, a new species of seamen, both in the navy and the merchant service; men, not slaves; men, who should, from sensible understanding of their relation to their officers, and manly considerations of duty and republican respect for law, be a thousand times more efficient and reliable, and honorable to the country, than these slaves of choice for a time, who need officers trained as bullies to command them—who are only strong from want of faith in their strength—who simply do their duty, because they dare not refuse to do it.

The national naval service should be the school of good seamen, not the harbor for bad ones, miserable sots, broken down “sogers” and insolent ruffians, that cannot or dare not take employment with decent men, at the market rate of wages. But this is the system we are at present trying; and they tell you, seriously, it is a failure, and you must restore the cat!

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Oh! why do we hear so little of the wrongs and the sufferings of the sailor. There is no cruelty, no tyranny, no suffering, no murdering of the spirit of men, and no murder of body or soul either, on Southern plantations that will compare with all this in nine out of ten ships that sail this year from New-York. Search the whole South, study all the noisome records of torture and villainy connected with Slavery, and if you could but sober all the sailors that dance in Cherry-street to night, you might learn of vastly more atrocity and barbarity. The first officer you meet, if you can but get him to calmly and candidly think back over his life, will tell you of cruelty to seamen that will make you turn from him with horror; and yet he will probably confess to you, brother in the Church, kind father, loving husband, mild and courteous gentleman though he be, that he himself has sanctioned or directed such cruelty; and he will defend it, and will be satisfied before God and man that it was right and necessary. On the principles everywhere recognized by seamen themselves, it is necessary. As sailors are, it is necessary. And yet nothing is doing at the North to give a better character to them, to make a better breed of sailors.

Unless these high wages of seamen induce a different class of men to go to sea, and promote men to command in the merchant service before they have been ruined in temper by incessant bullying, and all rational ideas of the principles of administration and execution forever made impossible to be habitual, by long slavery, there is no prospect that our sea-service will ever grow better, ever be less disgraceful or more Christianlike.

I repeat; this curse and shame upon the world is constantly passing in and out of our doorways, and no prospect of its ever being in the least reformed or mitigated, for all that Northern philanthropists are doing or thinking about it. God bless the Bethel people, and the “Seamen’s friend” people, and the Tract people, for their good purposes. Sailors’ Homes, I confess, have done good, more good a thousand times, than all other agencies that are employed for them; but all are as nothing. They count up their converts, they do not count the backsliders, and all who do not backslide never go to sea again while they are sober. If they do they are crazy.

One thing more I am reminded of in conversing with these naval gentlemen. It is a great deal harder for an officer to realize that sailors—common rope-haulers—are not of a lower grade than themselves of God’s original creation, than it is for slaveholders to believe that negroes are of the same race with white people.

Norfolk is a dirty, low, ill-arranged town, nearly divided by a morass. It has a single creditable public building, a number of fine private residences, and the polite society is reputed to be very agreeable, refined and cultivated, receiving a character from the families residing here. It has all the immoral and disagreeable characteristics of a large seaport, with very few of the advantages that we should expect to find in connection with, and as relief to them. No lyceum or public libraries, no public gardens, no galleries of art, and though [143] there are two “Bethels,” no“home” for its seamen; no public resorts of healthful and refining amusement, no place better than a filthy tobacco-impregnated bar-room or a licentious dance-cellar for the stranger of high or low degree to pass the hours unoccupied by business. If there are, they are so out of the way that, during a week in which I had a damp, foul lodging in its best hotel, I was unable, by diligent inquiry, to find them. I must add that one hotel, of good reputation, was temporarily closed, and the others were overcrowded. Norfolk has a safe and convenient harbor, forty feet in depth, and is every way favorably situated for a great commercial port.

Two objects of interest there are near Norfolk, the “Dismal Swamp,” the riches of which here find their main outlet, and the Naval Station of Gosport, with now the beautiful steamer Powhatan—the finest war-steamer I think she is in the world—and that big, blundering, useless line-of-battle-ship, the Pennsylvania. The market farms that supply “early truck” to you in New-York further demand some attention from the Agriculturist.