Again on the beach, with one solitary gold moidore in his purse, he found a friendly American skipper who offered him a passage to Philadelphia, which he accepted with the pious reflection that, although his mind was wounded and mortified by the financial disaster, his motives had been perfectly pure and honest.
He never saw his native land with so little pleasure as on this return to it, he assures us, and the shore on which he would have leaped with delight was covered with gloom and sadness.
Now what makes it so well worth while to sketch in brief outline the careers of one and another of these bygone shipmasters is that they accurately reflected the genius and the temper of their generation.
There was, in truth, no such word as failure in their lexicon.

It is this quality that appeals to us beyond all else.

Thrown on their beam ends, they were presently planning something else, eager to shake dice with destiny and with courage unbroken.

It was so with Amasa Delano, who promptly went to work "with what spirits I could revive within me.

After a time they returned to their former elasticity." He obtained a position as master builder in a shipyard, saved some money, borrowed more, and with one of his brothers was soon blithely building a vessel of two hundred tons for a voyage into the Pacific and to the northwest coast after seals.