Autograph Letter, signed. 3 pp. + integral stampless address leaf.
To his sister, Mary W. Clymer, Morrisville, Pennsylvania: "...I write you a line, by a whaler that is to sail tomorrow… Capt. Stribling has…been left entirely in the dark as Com. Dallas has not favoured him with a line or message on any subject…. our state of ignorance… absolutely no intelligence…. seriously afraid that our worst anticipations will be realized and that we are not to reach home till this time next year… …return by the Cape of Good Hope…reaching Canton in Sept. at the commencement of the N.E.Monsoon…. But Com. Dallas…means to detain us on the Coast… delaying our arrival in the United States till mid-summer of '45. Should the ship continue to float so long, for the rigging is now so rotten that it would not be safe to be aught in a gale with it. A radical error in our service is that Commodores have too much power and are nearly irresponsible, and the more so the farther they are from home…” Dr. Clymer, grandson of a signer of the Declaration of Independence and Constitution, was Naval Surgeon aboard the USS Cyane, the flagship of Commodore Thomas Jones's Pacific Squadron which had prematurely "captured" California in 1842, seizing Monterey from Mexican authorities in the mistaken belief that their countries were at war. The disgraced Jones, while awaiting his recall to Washington, sailed his small squadron to the Hawaiian Islands, where he transferred his pennant to another vessel and left for Tahiti, leaving the Cyane to make its own way back to Mexico and to idle at Acapulco for months without orders or mail from home, unaware that Jones and his successor, Commodore Alexander Dallas, had been locked in an angry dispute. While Dr. Clymer complained about “irresponsible Commodores”, the Cyane finally found Dallas at Callao, Peru – but shortly after, the exasperated new commander grew ill and died. When the Cyane finally returned home, yet another Commodore, John Drake Sloat, took command. When the real war with Mexico began two years later, Sloat sailed back to Monterey, where Marines and sailors from the Cyane again raised the American flag and claimed California territory for the United States – as Jones had done in 1842, but this time, for good.