NOTES AND SKETCHES OF THE CRUISE THE UNITED STATES STEAM FRIGATE "SUSQUEHANNA" BY LOUIS SANDS - CAPTAINS SECRETARY FROM MAY 1856 TO OCTOBER 1857 [manuscript title].
Sands, Louis Joseph:
[Philadelphia, New York, Havana, Key West, Nicaragua, Portugal, Spain, Italy, Algiers, Morocco, England, Ireland, and elsewhere [1],297,[2],[3]pp. Three ink and three pencil sketches, one portrait tintype, and three printed clippings. Approximately 90,000 words, in manuscript. Quarto. Original three-quarter sheep and paper boards, manuscript title on thick card affixed to front board. Binding moderately worn, front hinge cracked. Internally clean. Very good. In a cloth clamshell case, leather label. The extraordinary autograph shipboard journal of Captain's Secretary Louis J. Sands of the the U.S.S. Susquehanna, flagship of the U.S. Mediterranean Squadron from 1856 to 1857 and key player in the U.S. actions against William Walker in Nicaragua. Louis Joseph Sands (1836-ca.1910) grew up in a respectable New York family and attended good schools before "delicate health prevented his carrying out a very severe course of study" (NCAB, p.99). At the age of twenty, he availed himself of an opportunity "to see something of the world" by applying to the position of Captain's Secretary with his distant cousin, Joshua Rattoon Sands, on the Susquehanna. "The visions of a long pent-up desire to see the world - to make an extended tour through the Mediterranean - to realize those romantic impressions made upon my mind by books, & tales from friends filled my soul with ecstatic emotions & so strong was the desire for the day of departure to arrive, that I passed sleepless nights, feeling something might happen to prevent the maturing of so much happiness" (p.1). He would not be disappointed. As the Captain's closest fellow officer on the ship, sharing his living quarters, writing all of his official letters, and, in a "cocked hat & sword," accompanying him on all official visits and grand social festivities during the cruise, the younger Sands would find himself at the center of the many adventures the voyage would offer. In the course of two years, Sands would meet Barbary pirates off the coast of Morocco, study oil painting in Italy, escort a young countess to his first of several European balls, assist Samuel Morse and Cyrus West Field in the first attempt to lay the transatlantic telegraph cable, participate in the secret jungle raid that ended William Walker's filibuster in Nicaragua, and sail to Jamaica on a ship nearly overtaken by yellow fever. In the late 1890s, Sands returned to the journal and made numerous corrections, annotations, and additions to the narrative in an easily distinguishable later hand, providing an excellent supplement and interpretive key to his earlier narrative. The journal begins in Philadelphia, April 10, 1856, after Sands has learned that his application to the position of Captain's Secretary on board the USS Susquehanna was accepted. The Susquehanna, a sidewheel steamer, rated a steam frigate, had recently returned from the Pacific as flagship of Commodore Perry's squadron on his historic visits to Japan in 1853 and 1854. In the spring of 1856, she was recommissioned to join the Mediterranean Squadron. After arriving at the Philadelphia Navy Yard April 22 to report for duty, Sands waited for three weeks with his fellow officers and crew for orders to sail. On May 15, the Captain received orders to perform a mission of "Special Service" before continuing on to the Mediterranean, and the Susquehanna departed Philadelphia and sailed south two days later. While the exact nature of the service was not immediately revealed, Sands correctly assumed that it related to the filibustering of William Walker, who had recently taken control of the Nicaraguan government. After stops in Havana and Key West, the vessel met the USS Potomac, flagship of the Home Squadron under Commodore Hiram Paulding, to relay orders to Paulding from Washington. Upon reading the orders, Paulding himself ordered the Susquehanna to tow his substantially slower ship to the Nicaraguan port of San Juan del Norte. The specific episode that precipitated the mission began with a "misunderstanding" between pro-Walker American steamer captain Edward Tinklepaugh and the more credible British sloop captain John Walker Tarleton in the San Juan harbor, which threatened to further inflame the conflict involving Walker's forces, several Central American factions, Cornelius Vanderbilt's anti-Walker agents, and the U.S. military. The argument between Tinklepaugh and Tarleton had blown over by the time the ships arrived on June 7, and the Susquehanna began towing the Potomac back to Key West three days later. These events, which Sands describes in detail, foreshadow the final mission of the Susquehanna's voyage, a more dramatic visit to Nicaragua in the winter of 1857. The Susquehanna commenced its cross-Atlantic voyage on June 26, 1856, arriving at Gibraltar on July 23. For the next ten months, the frigate toured the Mediterranean as the flagship of the Mediterranean Squadron, visiting Malaga, Mahon, Palermo, Naples, Marseilles, Genoa, Livorno, and various ports in between. During this time, Sands writes extensively of his many adventures in Europe, as he meets American diplomats, numerous European aristocrats, and a variety of young women, attends balls, picnics, and soirées with the Captain, participates in a boat race with the other ships of the squadron (the Susquehanna victorious), encounters various other vessels, and visits a number of sites along the coasts. In May 1857, the squadron sailed to Great Britain, stopping briefly at Lisbon before touring the coasts of England and Ireland for the next four months. Here, Sands appears to have spent an even greater amount of time on shore, attending more receptions and making the acquaintance of various British notables and an ever- expanding train of young women. In June, Professor Samuel Morse became a guest of the Susquehanna as it sailed to west coast of Ireland to assist in the laying of the first transatlantic telegraph cable. After weeks of preparation and significant fanfare, the cables from North America and Ireland were joined, but they quickly separated, and the "cable fleet" was forced to abandon the effort (the first successful and lasting transatlantic cable would not come into service for another ten years). At the end of September, the squadron sailed back to the Mediterranean, this time visiting North Africa before continuing north to Italy. Off the coast of Morocco, the squadron encountered a band of "Riff pirates" and prepared for a skirmish. After recognizing and returning the Susquehanna's signal of truce, however, a group of the "Barbarians" joined Captain Sands in his boat and boarded the Susquehanna, where they expressed their astonishment at ship's armaments and shared a meal with the officers in the cabin, proving in the end to be "very agreeable fellows." After marveling at their impressively exotic attire and manners, the younger Sands volunteered to accompany the guests back to the shore, where he describes meeting a group of bedouins (including a sheikh's teenage daughter) and departs after a "warm handshaking" (pp. 270-3). The brief remainder of the Susquehanna's engagement at the Mediterranean Station is spent visiting Algiers and making return visits to Italy's Ligurian Coast and Minorca. Sands's 1856-7 journal ends on October 29, 1857, as the Susquehanna prepares to pass a final time through the Straits of Gibraltar and Sands records his reflections of his remarkable first journey abroad. Throughout both his original journal entries and later additions, Sands writes at length about his complicated relationship with and ambivalent feelings towards the Captain, creating an intimate portrait of an able and generally well-intentioned head officer whose positive traits were often overshadowed by an aversion to managing his own crew, periodic fits of irrational temper, and excessive vanity. The Captain twice had the younger Sands arrested and locked up under guard for impertinence, which leads Sands in his later commentary to make a variety of acerbic observations of his former employer. Sands's affection for the Captain is clear, however, noting early on in his later reflections that he "had a very kind heart" and "was always good to me" (p.17). Following the journal is a careful chart of the Susquehanna's arrival and departure dates from each of the ports it visited, followed by a brief but fascinating appendix on the final leg of the voyage, when the Susquehanna returned to Nicaragua and the William Walker debacle. Inscribed in Sands's later hand, the appendix describes the U.S. mission, organized by Commodore Paulding, to arrest and return William Walker and his forces to the U.S. in December 1857. On its way home from the Mediterranean, the Susquehanna stopped at Key West and continued on to Nicaragua. There, Paulding led a small river steamboat armed with howitzers and sailors from the Susquehanna and barges and yawls containing another hundred men, "armed to the teeth," 100 miles up the San Juan River, where Walker was firmly entrenched. Sands describes the cautious early morning approach to "Fort Walker" and the immediate surrender of the filibusters upon seeing the American flag. The works of the fort were destroyed, and the filibusters were taken back to San Juan. "[W]e treated the Fillibusters very well - giving them coffee & food - for they were most famished. A filthier and more atrocious looking set of villains never lived: they seemed, none of them, to have been washed in months - nor to have been fed for weeks and thereby certainly in no condition to fight anything. The Nicaraguans were far more cowardly & miserable to have allowed such a crew of vandals to have remained even twenty four hours on their coast: they should have despatched a battalion of troops & wiped them off of the Earth & that would have settled the question forever" (pp.[302-3]). After the filibusters were sent back to New York, the Susquehanna remained in Central America for several months with Paulding and his squadron, monitoring the coast as tensions continued to rise between the U.S. and Britain regarding the control of transit routes in the region. In March 1858, while lying in anchor at San Juan del Norte, yellow fever broke out on the Susquehanna, and the Captain ordered the vessel to sea. Upon reaching nearby Jamaica, approximately one third of the men and officers of the Susquehanna were disabled, "in bed - howling, wild, half crazy lunatics, with this dreadful scourge & the ship was in a vile disordered condition" (p.[304]). At Jamaica, the British authorities were "most kind," sending men to clean the ship, supplying it with fresh provisions, and ministering to the sick. The Susquehanna finally arrived in New York that April and remained in quarantine for nearly a month, with many of the crew transferred to the hospital on Staten Island. In addition to the long, rich, and well-composed narrative of Sands's voyage and his extensive later notes and corrections, the journal includes several charming sketches (three in ink and three in pencil) of ships and human subjects, including at least one of Captain Sands and at least one of the Susquehanna (both of which appear to occur a second time each in uncaptioned drawings). At least one of the pencil sketches, of a ball in England, is clearly a much later addition, as it appears on a sheet of paper inscribed entirely in Sands's later hand. The other drawings appear to be a combination of contemporary and later work by Sands. During a stop in Livorno, Sands notes that he has begun to take lessons in oil painting, and his interactions with Samuel Morse include advice from the scientist - himself originally a painter of portraits and landscapes - on painting and sketching. After serving in the U.S. Navy during the Civil War, Sands traveled to Germany and studied art at Munich. His NATIONAL CYCLOPEDIA biographical entry notes that he had a great love for art and became an accomplished amateur painter. The volume also includes a small foil griffin and Sands family motto ("Probum non poenitat") and a contemporary tintype portrait of Sands on the front pastedown. Sands signs the volume four times: on June 26, 1856, December 31, 1856, October 29, 1857, and August 31, 1897. NATIONAL CYCLOPAEDIA OF AMERICAN BIOGRAPHY VII, pp.99-100. DAB XVI, pp.343-4.
(Item ID: WRCAM39903) $11,000.00