It was my first experience of the ocean, and I was profoundly moved.
Oh, what solemn thoughts I had! How deeply I felt the greatness, the power of the scene! The immeasurable distance from horizon to horizon; the huge billows forever changing their shapes--now only a wavy and rolling plain, now a chain of great mountains, coming and going farther away; then a town in the distance, perhaps, with spires and towers and buildings of gigantic dimensions; and mostly a vast mass of uncertain shapes, knocking against each other in fury, and seething and foaming in their anger; the gray sky, with its mountains of gloomy clouds, flying, moving with the waves, as it seemed, very near them; the absence of any object besides the one ship; and the deep, solemn groans of the sea, sounding as if all the voices of the world had been turned into sighs and then gathered into that one mournful sound--so deeply did I feel the presence of these things, that the feeling became one of awe, both painful and sweet, and stirring and warming, and deep and calm and grand.
I would imagine myself all alone on the ocean, and Robinson Crusoe was very real to me.

I was alone sometimes.

I was aware of no human presence; I was conscious only of sea and sky and something I did not understand.

And as I listened to its solemn voice, I felt as if I had found a friend, and knew that I loved the ocean.

It seemed as if it were within as well as without, part of myself; and I wondered how I had lived without it, and if I could ever part with it.
And so suffering, fearing, brooding, rejoicing we crept nearer and nearer to the coveted shore, until, on a glorious May morning, six weeks after our departure from Polotzk, our eyes beheld the Promised Land, and my father received us in his arms..