[p. 86]
Learn to avoid what thou believ'st is sin,
Mind what reproves, or justifies, within.
No act is good that doth disturb thy peace,
Or can be bad which makes true joy increase.
Captain Coffin's last cruise was made in 1800, when Lucretia was seven years old. He sailed, as commander and owner of the ship Trial, in quest of seal-skins to take to China and exchange for silks, nankeens, china and tea. When he had been out about a year the Trial was seized by the Spaniards off the Pacific coast of South America for alleged violation of neutrality and taken to Valparaiso. Captain Coffin undertook his own defence in the Spanish courts and obtained some favorable decisions, but after much delay, finding that he could get no redress nor regain his vessel he crossed the Andes and sailed from a port in Brazil, reaching home after an absence of three years. His family had believed him lost. Great was their delight over his return. They never tired hearing him recount his adventures, and he in turn found amusement in teaching them Spanish phrases, some of which Lucretia remembered after she was an old woman of seventy.
Luckily, this ill-starred voyage proved profitable, for the seal-skins forwarded to China by another vessel made good returns. Some years later his brother, Capt. Mayhew Folger, had his ship seized in the same way, but more fortunate than Captain Coffin, he recovered both ship and $44,000 damages. This Captain Folger was the one who in 1809 discovered the lost mutineers of the English ship Bounty on Pitcairn's Island in the Pacific, where they had remained unmolested for nineteen years.
In seventh month, or July, 1804, Captain Coffin, with his family, removed to Boston, where he engaged in a profitable commercial business. This was the first time Lucretia or her sisters had ever left Nantucket, even for a visit, but, although she never returned to the island to live, Lucretia always regarded this first home with an affection different from that given to any other, and ever after ‘Nantucket way’ became household law.
