CHAPTER ONE

In which, like most People who tell their own Stories, I begin with
the Histories of other People.


I have every reason to believe that I was born in the year of our Lord
1786, for more than once I put the question to my father, and he
invariably made the same reply: "Why, Jack, you were launched a few
months before the Druids were turned over to the Melpomene." I have
since ascertained that this remarkable event occurred in January 1787.
But my father always reckoned in this way: if you asked him when such an
event took place, he would reply, so many years or months after such a
naval engagement or remarkable occurrence; as, for instance, when I one
day inquired how many years he had served the King, he responded, "I
came into the sarvice a little afore the battle of Bunker's Hill, in
which we licked the Americans clean out of Boston[1]." As for Anno
Domini, he had no notion of it whatever.

[Footnote 1: I have since heard a different version of the result of
this battle.]

Who my grandfather was, I cannot inform the reader, nor is it, perhaps,
of much consequence. My father was a man who invariably looked forward,
and hated anything like retrospection: he never mentioned either his
father or his mother; perhaps he was not personally acquainted with
them. All I could collect from him at intervals was, that he served in a
collier from South Shields, and that a few months after his