Philadelphia, and Mademoiselle Pictet to Colonel Kinloch, member of the Continental Congress from South Carolina. Thus supported in their undertaking the youthful travelers sailed from L'Orient on May 27, in an American vessel, the Kattie, Captain Loring. Of the sum which Gallatin, who supplied the capital for the expedition, brought from Geneva, one half had been expended in their land journey and the payment of the passages to Boston; one half, eighty louis d'or—the equivalent of four hundred silver dollars—remained, part of which they invested in tea. Reaching the American coast in a fog, or bad weather, they were landed at Cape Ann on July 14. From Gloucester they rode the next day to Boston on horseback, a distance of thirty miles. Here they put up at a French café, “The Sign of the Alliance,” in Fore Street, kept by one Tahon, and began to consider what step they should next take in the new world.

The prospects were not encouraging; the military fortunes of the struggling nation were never at a lower ebb than during the summer which intervened between the disaster of Camden and the discovery of Arnold's treason. Washington's army lay at New Windsor in enforced inactivity; enlistments were few, and the currency was almost worthless. Such was the stagnation in trade, that the young strangers found it extremely difficult to dispose of their little venture in tea. Two months were passed at the café, in waiting for an opportunity to go to Philadelphia, where Congress was in session, and where they expected to find the influential persons to whom they were accredited; also letters from Geneva. But this journey was no easy matter. The usual routes of travel were interrupted. New York was the fortified headquarters of the British army, and the Middle States were only to be reached by a détour through the American lines above the Highlands and behind the Jersey Hills.

The homesick youths found little to amuse or interest them in Boston, and grew very weary of its monotonous life and Puritanic tone. They missed the public amusements to which they were accustomed in their own country, and complained of the superstitious observance of Sunday, when “singing, fiddling, card-playing and bowling were forbidden.” Foreigners were not welcome guests in this town of prejudice. The sailors of the French fleet had already been the cause of one riot. Gallatin's letters show that this aversion was fully reciprocated by him.

The neighboring country had some points of interest. No Swiss ever saw a hill without an intense desire to get to its top. They soon felt the magnetic attraction of the Blue Hills of Milton, and, descrying from their summit the distant mountains north of Worcester, made a pedestrian excursion thither the following day. Mr. Gallatin was wont to relate with glee an incident of this trip, which Mr. John Russell Bartlett repeats in his “Reminiscences.”

Nor was this an unnatural remark. At this time Mr. Gallatin did not speak English with facility, and indeed was never free from a foreign accent.

At the little café they met a Swiss woman, the wife of a Genevan, one De Lesdernier, who had been for thirty years established in Nova Scotia, but, becoming compromised in the attempt to revolutionize the colony, was compelled to fly to New England, and had settled at Machias, on the northeastern extremity of the Maine frontier. Tempted by her account of this region, and perhaps making a virtue of necessity, Gallatin and Serre bartered their tea for rum, sugar, and tobacco, and, investing the remainder of their petty capital in similar merchandise, they embarked October 1, 1780, upon a small coasting vessel, which, after a long and somewhat perilous passage, reached the mouth of the Machias River on the 15th of the same month. Machias was then a little settlement five miles from the mouth of the stream of the same name. It consisted of about twenty houses and a small fortification, mounting seven guns and garrisoned by fifteen or twenty men. The young travelers were warmly received by the son of Lesdernier, and made their home under his roof. This seems to have been one of the four or five log houses in a large clearing near the fort. Gallatin attempted to settle a lot of land, and the meadow where he cut the hay with his own hands is still pointed out. This is Frost's meadow in Perry, not far from the site of the Indian village. A single cow was the beginning of a farm, but the main occupation of the young men was woodcutting. No record remains of the result of the merchandise venture. The trade of Machias was wholly in fish, lumber, and furs, which, there being no money, the settlers were ready enough to barter for West India goods. But the outlet for the product of the country was, in its unsettled condition, uncertain and precarious, and the young traders were no better off than before. One transaction only is remembered, the advance by Gallatin to the garrison of supplies to the value of four hundred dollars; for this he took a draft on the state treasury of Massachusetts, which, there being no funds for its payment, he sold at one fourth of its face value.

The life, rude as it was, was not without its charms. Serre seems to have abandoned himself to its fascination without a regret. His descriptive letters to Badollet read like the “Idylls of a Faun.” Those of Gallatin, though more tempered in tone, reveal quiet content with the simple life and a thorough enjoyment of nature in its original wildness. In the summer they followed the tracks of the moose and deer through the primitive forests, and explored the streams and lakes in the light birch canoe, with a woodsman or savage for their guide. In the winter they made long journeys over land and water on snowshoes or on skates, occasionally visiting the villages of the Indians, with whom the Lesderniers were on the best of terms, studying their habits and witnessing their feasts. Occasional expeditions of a different nature gave zest and excitement to this rustic life. These occurred when alarms of English invasion reached the settlement, and volunteers marched to the defence of the frontier. Twice Gallatin accompanied such parties to Passamaquoddy, and once, in November, 1780, was left for a time in command of a small earthwork and a temporary garrison of whites and Indians at that place. At Machias Gallatin made one acquaintance which greatly interested him, that of La Pérouse, the famous navigator. He was then in command of the Amazone frigate, one of the French squadron on the American coast, and had in convoy a fleet of fishing vessels on their way to the Newfoundland banks. Gallatin had an intense fondness for geography, and was delighted with La Pérouse's narrative of his visit to Hudson's Bay, and of his discovery there (at Fort Albany, which he captured) of the manuscript journal of Samuel Hearne, who some years before had made a voyage to the Arctic regions in search of a northwest passage. Gallatin and La Pérouse met subsequently in Boston.