legal "gents" who were usually to be found hanging about Pier 9, East River, when the Sea Witch was reported coming up the bay. We shall hear more of Captain Waterman and his crew on board of the Challenge in a later chapter.
The celebrated clipper-ship captain, Nathaniel Brown Palmer, the first commander of the Paul Jones, Houqua, Samuel Russell, and Oriental, was born in the pretty town of Stonington, on Long Island Sound in 1799, and came from distinguished colonial ancestry. His grandfather's only brother fell mortally wounded at the battle of Groton Heights in 1771, while his father was an eminent lawyer and a man of marked ability.
At the age of fourteen or just as the War of 1812 was fairly under way, Nathaniel shipped on board of a coasting vessel which ran to ports between Maine and New York, and continued in this service until he was eighteen, when he was appointed second mate of the brig Hersilia, bound down somewhere about Cape Horn on a sealing voyage.
These sealing expeditions were also at that period more or less voyages of discovery. For years there had been rumors of a mythical island called Auroras, embellished with romance and mystery by the whalers of Nantucket, New Bedford, and New London, and described as lying away to the eastward of the Horn, concerning which no forecastle yarn was too extravagant for belief. Whaling captains by the score had spent days and weeks in unprofitable search for it. On this voyage Captain J. P. Sheffield, of the Hersilia, landed at one of the Falkland Islands, where he left his second mate
