January 5th, 1851, at one o’clock in the morning, we started from Banbury, twenty miles to Leamington railway station in company with John Goodman and Williams Jeffs, Brother Martin Niles Harris of Harley Branch. (Some five or six years before he joined the Church, he had been unfortunate in business and was indebted to a wholesale grocer for two hundred dollars or that amount in English money. This grocer was also a Methodist Priest and he had sold Brother Harris household furniture but the expenses were so much for Law that there was not enough to pay the debt. He, some time after, took his horse and cart and sold them, but there was still not enough to settle the bill and pay expenses. When Brother Harris had been in the Church some ten months and was preparing to come out with me to the Valley, this Priest put a sherrif’s officer in to his house for the purpose of keeping him back. Seeing this was done out of Deviltry, I thought I would checkmate him. Before the sherrif had time to make an inventory of his goods, I got a wagon and sent on to the outside of the village and got some of the Bretheren to go with me and took some Gin under a pretext of spending a few hours with Brother Harris, and so put the officer off his guard after we gave him some gin with laudanum in it. It put him to sleep and when he woke the next morning, he found all the goods gone and the house empty of everything but himself. I had all the things taken to my house at Banbury and sold them the same time I sold our own. When this Priest found himself foiled, he sent Brother Harris to the Debttor’s Prison for forty days (at Oxford). This would stop him from going with us, but as the “Ellen Maria” was going to sail in a few days, I sent to Brother Pratt to get his family and him transferred to that ship, which was done. I sent Brother Pratt the circumstances of the case and when Brother Harris’ time would be up two days before the ship would sail—and as the Priest could not send him to prison again under four days, this would give Brother Harris time to get away. Before he could be taken again, I sent Brother Edward Smith to Oxford with written instructions to Brother Harris, along with money to pay his fare by rail to Liverpool when his time was out. By this means, I got him safe away. When we got to Leamington, we stayed about two hours with the Saints and then started by rail to Birmingham.
We arrived at Birmingham, the place where I was born, and I was a stranger in a city where I had spent the first 28 years of my life. We stopped here all night and went to Liverpool on the 7th. We arrived at noon and secured lodgings for our families (twenty-seven persons) and went to the railway station to meet our families. At ten o’clock at night on the 9th, we went on board the “George Washington Bourn” left the docks on the tenth and went into the river.
One night our ship parted from her anchor and run afoul of an old Man of War that was moored in the river. We had to get a new anchor. Here we were detained by head winds until the 23rd day. We entered the Freight Channel where we had bad weather with head winds and was continually tacking—sometime on the Irish coast and ten on the Welch. The ship sprung a leak and had to shift cargo to get at it and they had to keep the pumps going. The carpenter stopped it on the first of February. We entered the Atlantic Ocean and I had been sick for a week, but the sight of the sea, when it is storming is something sublimely grand—at one time on the top of a huge wave and then down in the trough of the sea’s waves. We saw a great many different kind of fish; from the whale (some of which kept us company as they would dive under the ship’s bottom and come up on the other side and seemed full of squirt), the flying fish were numerous. We also saw some sharks. One day we caught a large porpoise. The flesh after two or three days tastes something like beef. There was a curious shell fish called a Portuguese Man of War. It would float on the surface of the water and throw up a sail. A man in our company caught one of them and got it on deck. As soon as he picked it up, he received a powerful electric shock. He fell down like as if he was dead and it was two days before he got over it.
We had fourteen able seaman in our company and it was well for us. We had the ship’s crew of only twelve men, including a carpenter and Cook. One fine morning the Captain came out of his cabin and called out, “squall ahead!” I looked away on the horizon and there was a small white cloud, no larger than a man’s hat. All hands turned out and began taking canvas, but before they had got it all in the squall struck the ship. The force was terrible—the deck was deep in water, the scuppers could not run it off fast enough; the carpenter had to knock off some of the planks out of her bulwarks to let the water off. About this time, Sister Baker lost a child and it was buried in the ocean. This was the only one that died during the voyage. We got to the lighthouse on the coast of Cuba at about seven in the evening. Here we anchored for the night and at daylight the next morning, we started into a channel called The Hole in the Wall. It was very dangerous, the passage through. You could see the rocks under the water on each side of the ship sticking up like the peaks of small hills.
We called the men, women and children on the beach and with a wind mill at work and some men called wreckers and some small craft moored near the land, we had a fair wind all the way through this channel. If we had had a head wind, we should have gone on to the sunken rocks and been lost for we could not take ship--there was not room to turn in the length of the ship; but we arrived at New Orleans in eight weeks from the time we left Liverpool.
When we cast anchor in the Mississippi River, we had our guards set at each hatchway. I was posted at the main hatch. We had about a hundred Roughs come on board for the purpose of plunder, but we would not let anyone go below. This made them mad and they said they would mob the first man that landed. They stayed on the deck till it was dark, thinking we should relax our vigilance; but they were mistaken; on the following day, Brother Gibson chartered the dyram nosy {?] Concordia; and we started up the River for Saint Louis. In seven days our family all went for the time being, in a house in Ninth Street where the rats would run over your face in the night. I soon got to work at my trade as a Jeweller for a man names Herbal [?] and left living in the rat’s nest. But I was sick with the bowel complaint. The President of the Branch told I had better leave and go up the river or I would die with Cholera, when it came again. Brother Rigley was President at this time. I had been at work one week when a steam boat, “Elex Scott,” came to the landing. I went to see who was on board of it when I found Brother Martin Niles Harris, the only family left. He had no money to help himself off. The Captain of the boat said he stayed on the boat until he had got his cargo on the boat. I told him that was no place for his family to be exposed and that he had better go with me to stay at my house. He said he had no means to pay for the removal of his boxes. I went and got a dray and took his family and goods to my house. That was on the Friday and on the Sunday, his wife was confined of a girl. They lived with me six weeks and had nothing to do and he had got his foot hurt, but one could not see what was the matter with it and he began to act as if he was getting craisey over it. I got some chamomile flowers and boiled them and bathed his foot and bound the chamomile on it. The next morning, his foot was as black as coal. This made his mind easy and he soon got well.
BIB: Richard Britton papers, 1847-1937; Record book, 1878-1916; Church History Library, MS 26537, pp. 129-131.
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