CHAPTER I.



The beginning - My early life and character - I thirst for
adventure in foreign lands and go to sea.


ROVING has always been, and still is, my ruling passion, the joy of
my heart, the very sunshine of my existence. In childhood, in
boyhood, and in man's estate, I have been a rover; not a mere
rambler among the woody glens and upon the hill-tops of my own
native land, but an enthusiastic rover throughout the length and
breadth of the wide wide world.

It was a wild, black night of howling storm, the night in which I
was born on the foaming bosom of the broad Atlantic Ocean. My
father was a sea-captain; my grandfather was a sea-captain; my
great-grandfather had been a marine. Nobody could tell positively
what occupation HIS father had followed; but my dear mother used to
assert that he had been a midshipman, whose grandfather, on the
mother's side, had been an admiral in the royal navy. At anyrate
we knew that, as far back as our family could be traced, it had
been intimately connected with the great watery waste. Indeed this
was the case on both sides of the house; for my mother always went
to sea with my father on his long voyages, and so spent the greater
part of her life upon the water.

Thus it was, I suppose, that I came to inherit a roving