PREFACE


This book has evolved from another which I had for years been urged to
write by personal friends. I had chatted occasionally about my own
voyages, related incidents concerning them and the countries and
places I had visited, the ships I had sailed in, the men I had sailed
with, and the sailors of that period. It is one thing to tell
sea-tales in a cosy room and to enjoy living again for a brief time in
the days that are gone; but it is another matter when one is asked to
put the stories into book form. Needless to say for a long time I
shrank from undertaking the task, but was ultimately prevailed upon to
do so. The book was commenced and was well advanced, and, as I could
not depict the sailors of my own period without dealing--as I thought
at the time--briefly with the race of men called buccaneers who were
really the creators of the British mercantile marine and Navy, who
lived centuries before my generation, I was obliged to deal with some
of them, such as Hawkins, Drake, Frobisher, Daimper, Alexander Selkirk
of Robinson Crusoe fame, and others who combined piracy with commerce
and sailorism. After I had written all I thought necessary about the
three former, I instinctively slipped on to Nelson as the greatest
sea personality of the beginning of the last century. I found the
subject so engrossing that I could not centre my thoughts on any
other, so determined to continue my narrative, which is not, and never
was intended to be a life of Nelson. Perhaps it may be properly termed
fragmentary thoughts and jottings concerning the life of an
extraordinary human force, written at intervals when I had leisure