some time toward the end of the last
century, or the beginning of the present one, in the great city of
Amsterdam, which, after all, has the greatest right to be called the
capital of Holland; for The Hague, where the King lives and the Chambers
meet, is, though a mighty fine place, only a big village, and a village
is not a city any more than a treykschuyt is a three-decker, or a
boatswain an admiral. At the same time, mind you, if I was put on my
oath before a court-martial, I would not undertake to swear that I may
not have been born at Rotterdam, at Dordrecht, at Leyden, at Delft, or
even at The Hague itself; for, you see, my father was a peddler, and was
continually wandering up and down the country (or rather the canals, for
he mostly travelled by treykschuyt), selling all kinds of small matters
to whomsoever would buy, that he might keep his wife and small children
in bread, cheese, and salt herrings: which were pretty well all we had
to live upon. But what does it matter where a fellow was born? The
great thing is to be born at all, and to take care to keep your watch,
and to turn cheerfully out of your bunk when the hands are turned up to
reef topsails in a gale.

I know that, when I first began to remember anything, we were living in
the city of Amsterdam, and in the very middle of the Jews' quarter,
which I shall always bear in mind as having five distinct and permanent
smells--one of tobacco, one of Schiedam, one of red herrings, one of
bilge-water, one of cheese, and one of Jews. At Cologne, on the Rhine,
they say there are seventy smells, all as distinct from one another as
the different ropes of a ship; but I have not travelled much on the
Rhine, and know much more about Canton than of Cologne. Although we
lived among the Jews, my father was no Israelite:--far from it. He was
a good Protestant of the Calvinistic persuasion; and, in the way of
business, sold many footwarmers (little boxes of wood and wire, to hold
charcoal embers), for the churches. He chose to live among the Jews,
because their quarter was a cheap one; and he could pick up the things
he wanted more easily there than anywhere else; and, besides, Jews, for
all the hard things that may be said about them, are not a bad sort of
people to do business with. They are hard upon sailors, it is true, in
the way of cheating them; yet they will always let a poor tar have a
little money when he wants any; and they are always good for a bite of