The Mate of the Vancouver — page 11: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

Ith 2 THE MATE OF THE VANCOUVER. own, quite independent of whsi the papers call “style,” which a sailor, who has never written much besides a log and a few love- letters, cannot pretend to have, That is what I think. Our family—for somehow it seems as if I must begin at the beginning—was always given to the sea. There is a story that my great-grandfather was a pirate or buccaneer ; my grandfather, I know, was in the Royal Navy, and my father commanded a China clipper when they used to make, for those days, such fast runs home with the new season’s tea. Of course, with these examples before us, my brother and I took the same line, and were apprenticed as soon as our mother could make up her mind to part with her sons. Will was six years older than I, and he was second mate in the vessel in which I served my apprenticeship; but, though we were brothers, there wasn’t much