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.