June 15, 1840.
2
8 o'clock.—Another pilot-boat comes dancing over the waves to the wild music of the gale, and is evidently intending to reach us. Now she makes a circuit around us, having a light skiff or wherry floating at her stern, with the pilot and two or three oarsmen in it, ready to be cast off, that he may be put on board; now it is alongside—and now the man of all men, at this crisis, leaps on to the deck—and now we all breathe freely once more.
It is astonishing to see how instantaneous has been the relief afforded by his presence.
Once more we are under weigh, slowly and cautiously.
All at once, too, we are in the midst of a great hubbub!
The pilot has brought a copy of the Liverpool
Chronicle of June 13, in which are detailed, at great length, the particulars of an attempt to assassinate Queen Victoria and her husband,
Prince3 Albert, by a youth only 17 years of age, named
Edward Oxford.
As these particulars will be spread before you in the
Boston papers quite as soon as the contents of this sheet will meet your eye, I will not attempt to make even a synopsis of them here.
Suffice it to say, the mad attempt at murder proved abortive.
As a large proportion of our passengers are Englishmen, the news created no little sensation in their breasts; but when, on reading the account aloud at their request, I came to the statement, that ‘the prisoner's father was a mulatto, and his grandfather was a black,’ they yelled like so many fiends broke loose from the bottomless pit—(remember!
they have been to
America, and have got the
virus of slavery and prejudice
