The next step toward the goal of happiness found me before the mast in a full-rigged ship bound on a foreign voyage.

Thus I came "over the bows," and not in through the cabin windows, to the command of a ship.
My best command was that of the magnificent ship _Northern Light_, of which I was part-owner.

I had a right to be proud of her, for at that time--in the eighties--she was the finest American sailing-vessel afloat.

Afterward I owned and sailed the _Aquidneck_, a little bark which of all man's handiwork seemed to me the nearest to perfection of beauty, and which in speed, when the wind blew, asked no favors of steamers, I had been nearly twenty years a shipmaster when I quit her deck on the coast of Brazil, where she was wrecked.

My home voyage to New York with my family was made in the canoe _Liberdade_, without accident.
[Illustration: Drawn by W.Taber.The _Northern Light_, Captain Joshua Slocum, bound for Liverpool, 1885.] My voyages were all foreign.