Once among the
guests of that boat a young girl named Laura so attracted him that he
forgot time and space until one of the "Roe" pilots, Zeb Leavenworth,
came flying aft, shouting:
"The 'Pennsylvania' is backing out!"
A hasty good-by, a wild flight across the decks of several boats, and a
leap across several feet of open water closed the episode. He wrote to
Laura, but there was no reply. He never saw her again, never heard from
her for nearly fifty years, when both were widowed and old. She had not
received his letter.
Occasionally there were stirring adventures aboard the "Pennsylvania."
In a letter written in March, 1858, the young pilot tells of an exciting
night search in the running ice for Hat Island soundings:
Brown, the pilot, stood in the bow with an oar, to keep her head out, and
I took the tiller. We would start the men, and all would go well until
the yawl would bring us on a heavy cake of ice, and then the men would
drop like so many tenpins, while Brown assumed the horizontal in the
bottom of the boat. After an hour's hard work we got back, with ice half
an inch thick on the oars . . . . The next day was colder still. I
was out in the yawl twice, and then we got through, but the infernal
steamboat came near running over us .
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