However, the gloomy voyage was duly made.  One of the most experienced captains known on the route, Captain Pittock, had been chosen to pilot the venture.  He had plainly a distrust of his charge and the new-fangled notion.  Soon we were nearing Calais.  Here was the lighthouse, and here the two embracing arms of the wickerwork pier.  I was standing at the bows, and could see the crowds on the shore waiting.  Suddenly, as the word was given to starboard or ‘port,’ the malignant thing, instead of obeying, took the reverse direction, and bore straight into the pier on the left!  Down crashed the huge flag-staff of our vessel in fragments, falling among us—­and there were some narrow escapes.  She calmly forced her way down the pier for nearly a hundred yards, literally crunching and smashing it up into fragments, and sweeping the whole away.  I looked back on the disastrous course, and saw the whole clear behind us!  As we gazed on this sudden wreck, I am ashamed to say there was a roar of laughter, for never was a surprise of so bewildering a character sprung upon human nature.  The faces of the poor captain and his sailors, who could scarcely restrain their maledictions on the ill-conditioned ‘brute,’ betrayed mortification and vexation in the most poignant fashion.  The confusion was extraordinary.  She was now with difficulty brought over to the other pier.  This, though done ever so gently, brought fresh damage, as the mere contact crunched and dislocated most of the timbers.  The ill-assured party defiled ashore, and we made for the banqueting-room between rows of half-jeering, half-sympathizing spectators.  The speakers at the symposium required all their tact to deal with the disheartening subject.  The only thing to be done was to ‘have confidence’ in the invention—­much as a Gladstonian in difficulty invites the world to ’leave all to the skill of our great chief.’  But, alas! this would not do just now.  The vessel was, in fact, unsteerable; the enormous weight of the engines at the bows prevented her obeying the helm.  The party set off to Paris—­such as were in spirits to do so—­and the shareholders in the company must have had aching hearts enough.

Some years later, walking by the Thames bank, not far from Woolwich, I came upon some masses of rusted metal, long lying there.  There were the huge cranks of paddle-wheels, a cylinder, and some boiler metal.  These, I was informed, were the fragments of the unlucky steamship that was to abolish sea-sickness!  As I now walked to the end of the solitary pier—­the very one I had seen swept away so unceremoniously—­the recollection of this day came back to me.  There was an element of grim comedy in the transaction when I recalled that the Calais harbour officials sent in—­and reasonably—­a huge claim for the mischief done to the pier; but the company soon satisfied that by speedily going ‘into liquidation.’  There was no resource, so the Frenchmen had to rebuild their pier at their own cost.