necessaries, a few of these your superfluities distributed occasionally, may be of great service, restore health, save life, make the miserable happy, and thereby afford you infinite pleasure.

The worst thing in ordinary merchant ships is the cookery. They have no professed cook, and the worst hand as a seaman is appointed to that office, in which he is not only very ignorant but very dirty. The sailors have therefore a saying, that God sends meat and the devil cooks., Passengers more piously disposed, and willing to believe heaven orders all things for the best, may suppose, that, knowing the sea-air and constant exercise by the motion of the vessel would give extraordinary appetites, bad cooks were kindly sent to prevent our eating too much; or that, foreseeing we should have bad cooks, good appetites were furnished to prevent our starving. If you cannot trust to these circumstances, a spirit-lamp, with a blaze-pan, may enable you to cook some little things for yourself; such as a hash, a soup, &c. And it might be well also to have among your stores some potted meats, which if well put up will keep long good. A small tin oven, to place with the open side before the fire, may be another good utensil, in which your own servant may roast for you a bit of pork or mutton. You will sometimes be induced to eat of the ship's salt beef, as it is often good. You will find cyder the best quencher of that thirst which salt meat or fish occasions. The ship biscuit is too hard for some sets of teeth. It may be softened by toasting. But rusk is better: for being made of good fermented bread, sliced and baked a second time, the pieces imbibe the water easily, soften immediately, digest more kindly, and are therefore more wholesome than the unfermented biscuit. By the way, rusk is the true original biscuit, so prepared to keep for sea, biscuit in French signifying twice baked. If your dry peas boil hard, a two-pound iron shot put with them into the pot, will by the motion of the ship grind them as fine as mustard.

The accidents I have seen at sea with large dishes of soup upon a table, from the motion of the ship, have made me wish that our potters or pewterers would make soup dishes in divisions, like a set of small bowls united together, each containing about sufficient for one person, in some such form as fig, 26; for then when the ship should make a sudden heel, the soup would not in a body flow over one side, and fall into people's laps and scald them, as is sometimes the case, but would be retained in the separate divisions, as in figure 27.

After these trifles, permit the addition of a few general reflections. Navigation, when employed in supplying necessary provision to a country in want, and thereby preventing famines, which were more frequent and destructive before the invention of that art, is undoubtedly a blessing to mankind. When employed merely in transporting superfluities, it is a question whether the advantage of the employment it affords is equal to the mischief of hazarding so many lives on the ocean. But when employed in pillaging merchants and transporting slaves, it is clearly the means of augmenting the mass of human misery. It is amazing to think of the ships and lives risked in fetching tea from China, coffee from Arabia, sugar and tobacco from America, all which our ancestors did well without. Sugar employs near one thousand ships, tobacco almost as many. For the utility of tobacco there is little to be said; and for that of sugar, how much more commendable would it be if we could give up the few minutes' gratification afforded once or twice a-day by the taste of sugar in our tea, rather than encourage the cruelties exercised in producing it! An eminent French moralist says, that when he considers the wars we excite in Africa to obtain slaves, the numbers necessarily slain in those wars, the many prisoners who perish at sea by sickness, bad provisions, foul air, &c. &c. in the transportation, and how many afterwards die from the hardships of slavery, he cannot look on a piece of sugar without conceiving it stained with spots of human blood! had he added the consideration of the wars we make to take and retake the sugar islands from one another, and the fleets and armies that perish in those expeditions, he might have seen his sugar not merely spotted, but thoroughly dyed scarlet in grain. It is these wars that make the maritime powers of Europe, the inhabitants of London and Paris, pay dearer for sugar than those of Vienna, a thousand miles from the sea; because their sugar costs not only the price they pay for it by the pound, but all they pay in taxes to maintain the fleets and armies that fight for it.'

With great esteem, I am, Sir, your most obedient humble servant,

B. FRANKLin.

* See "A Thought concerning the Sugar Islands," Part II. page 168. of this volume.

London, Published by Henry Colburn, Conduit Street, July 1818.

ON THE GULPH STREAM.

Remarks upon the Navigation from Newfoundland to New York, in order to avoid the Gulph Stream on one hand, and on the other the Shoals that lie to the southward of Nantucket and of St. George's Banks. [See Plate.]

After you have passed the banks of Newfoundland in about the 44th degree of latitude, you will meet with nothing till you draw near the Isle of Sables, which we commonly pass in latitude 43. Southward of this isle, the current is found to extend itself as far north as 41° 20′ or 30', then it turns towards the E. S. E. or S. E. 1 E.

Having passed the Isle of Sables, shape your course for the St. George's Banks, so as to pass them in about latitude 40°, because the current southward of those banks reaches as far north as 39°. The shoals of those banks lie in 41° 35'.

After having passed St. George's Banks, you must, to clear Nantucket, form your course so as to pass between the latitudes 38° 30′ and 40° 45'.

The most southern part of the shoals of Nantucket lie in about 40° 45'. The northern part of the current, directly to the south of Nantucket, is felt in about latitude 38° 30'.

By observing these directions and keeping between the stream and the shoals, the passage from the banks of Newfoundland to New York, Delaware, or Virginia, may be considerably shortened; for so you will have the advantage of the eddy current, which moves contrary to the Gulph Stream. Whereas if to avoid the shoals you keep too far to the southward, and get into that stream, you will be retarded by it at the rate of 60 or 70 miles a-day.

The Nantucket whale-men being extremely well acquainted with the Gulph Stream, its course, strength, and extent, by their constant practice of whaling on the edges of it, from their island quite down to the Bahamas, this draft of that stream was obtained from one of them, captain Folger, and caused to be engraved on the old chart in London, for the benefit of navigators, by B. FRANKLIN.

Note. The Nantucket captains who are acquainted with this stream, make their voyages from England to Boston in as short a time generally as others take in going from Boston to England, viz. from twenty to thirty days. A stranger may know when he is in the Gulph Stream, by the warmth of the water, which is much greater than that of the water on each side of it. If then he is bound to the westward, he should cross the stream to get out of it as soon as possible. B. FRANKLIN.