[In Leghorn (Livorno), Italy, about the year 1822, the poet Shelley was induced by his friend E.J. Trelawny to visit the port. They went aboard a Greek ship, then saw a Yankee clipper.]
"You must allow," [says Trelawny,] "that graceful craft was designed by a man who had a poet's feeling for things beautiful...."
The idea so pleased the Poet that he followed me on board her. The Americans are a social, free-and-easy people...so that our coming on board, and examination of the vessel, fore and aft, were not considered as intrusion. The captain was on shore, so I talked to the mate, a smart specimen of a Yankee....
The Yankee would not let us go until we had drunk, under the star-spangled banner, to the memory of Washington, and the prosperity of the American commonwealth.
"As a warrior and statesman," said Shelley, "he was righteous in all he did, unlike all who lived before or since; he never used his power but for the benefit of his fellow-creatures.
" 'He fought
For truth and wisdom, foremost of the brave;
Him glory's idle glances dazzled not;
'Twas his ambition, generous and great,
A life to life's great end to consecrate.' "*
"Stranger," said the Yankee, "truer words were never spoken; there is dry rot in all the main timbers of the Old World, and none of you will do any good till you are docked, refitted, and annexed to the new. You must log the song that you sang; there ain't many Britishers that will say as much of the man that whipped them...."
--From E.J. Trelawny, Recollections of the Last Days of Shelley and Byron, cited in The New Oxford Book of Literary Anecdotes (2006), ed. John Gross
* Shelley was quoting from the poem "The Waterfall" by Gavrila Romanovich Derzhavin in Specimens of the Russian Poets, as translated by John Bowring (1821).
The fast, skilfully sailed American ships had excited much admiration from the British during the War of 1812 a few years earlier (the American war, to the British, was a minor part of the Napoleonic Wars). This anecdote is from the website American Merchant Marine at War:
The privateer America earned quite a reputation for the number of British ships she plundered and the value of the cargo seized. The marauding work of the America was so devastating to the British merchant marine that the British government built a frigate, the Dublin, for the express purpose of chasing the America from the seas.
Long after the war ended, the captain of America and the captain of the Dublin met in Valparaíso [Chile]. Neither knew the other's identity. In the course of a conversation the Briton remarked:
"I was once almost within gun-shot of that infernal Yankee skimming-dish, just as night came on. By daylight she had outsailed the Dublin so devilish fast that she was no more than a speck on the horizon. By the way, I wonder if you happen to know the name of the beggar that was master of her."
"I'm the beggar," smiled the American master and they drank a toast to each other's health.
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