"He kept his men at the guns, and when the ship swung her broadside so as to bear upon any of the Spanish ships, he kept up a fire at them.In this situation the brave fellow continued to lie for three-quarters of an hour before he got his topsails sheeted home.The action continued in this manner for near an hour and a half.He succeeded in getting the ship to sea, however, in defiance of all the force that could be brought against him.The ship was very much cut to pieces in sails, rigging, and hull; and a considerable number of men were killed and wounded on board.
"Hudson kept flying from one part of the deck to the other during the whole time of action, encouraging and threatening the men as occasion required.He kept a musket in his hand most part of the time, firing when he could find the leisure.Some of the men came aft and begged him to give up the ship, telling him they should all be killed--that the carpenter had all one side of him shot away--that one man was cut in halves with a double-headed shot as he was going aloft to loose the foretopsail and the body had fallen on deck in two separate parts--that such a man was killed at his duty on the forecastle, and one more had been killed in the maintop--that Sam, Jim, Jack, and Tom were wounded and that they would do nothing more towards getting the ship out of the harbor.
"His reply to them was, "then you shall be sure to die, for if they do not kill you I will, so sure as you persist in any such cowardly resolution," saying at the same time, 'OUT SHE GOES, ORDOWN SHE GOES.'"
By this resolute and determined conduct he kept the men to their duty and succeeded in accomplishing one of the most daring enterprises perhaps ever attempted.
An immortal phrase, this simple dictum of first mate Hudson of the Betsy, "Out she goes, or down she goes," and not unworthy of being mentioned in the same breath with Farragut's "Damn the torpedoes."Joined by his brother Samuel in the schooner Pilgrim, which was used as a tender in the sealing trade, Amasa Delano frequented unfamiliar beaches until he had taken his toll of skins and was ready to bear away for Canton to sell them.There were many Yankee ships after seals in those early days, enduring more peril and privation than the whalemen, roving over the South Pacific among the rock-bound islands unknown to the merchant navigator.
The men sailed wholly on shares, a seaman receiving one per cent of the catch and the captain ten per cent, and they slaughtered the seal by the million, driving them from the most favored haunts within a few years.For instance, American ships first visited Mas a Fuera in 1797, and Captain Delano estimated that during the seven years following three million skins were taken to China from this island alone.He found as many as fourteen vessels there at one time, and he himself carried away one hundred thousand skins.It was a gold mine for profit while it lasted.
There were three Delano brothers afloat in two vessels, and of their wanderings Amasa set down this epitome: "Almost the whole of our connections who were left behind had need of our assistance, and to look forward it was no more than a reasonable calculation to make that our absence would not be less than three years...together with the extraordinary uncertainty of the issue of the voyage, as we had nothing but our hands to depend upon to obtain a cargo which was only to be done through storms, dangers, and breakers, and taken from barren rocks in distant regions.But after a voyage of four years for one vessel and five for the other, we were all permitted to return safe home to our friends and not quite empty-handed.We had built both of the vessels we were in and navigated them two and three times around the globe." Each one of the brothers had been a master builder and rigger and a navigator of ships in every part of the world.
By far the most important voyage undertaken by American merchantmen during the decade of brilliant achievement following the Revolution was that of Captain Robert Gray in the Columbia, which was the first ship to visit and explore the northwest coast and to lead the way for such adventurers as Richard Cleveland and Amasa Delano.On his second voyage in 1792, Captain Gray discovered the great river he christened Columbia and so gave to the United States its valid title to that vast territory which Lewis and Clark were to find after toiling over the mountains thirteen years later.
