r ship, I reckon,
aboard which the captain was a parson, and the bo'sun a schoolmaster,
and the crew a pack of loblolly-boys, with their brains full of
book-learning, and nothing else.

I wasn't so very quick, though, as I thought, in my boyish foolishness,
that I should be, in finding a ship at Rotterdam. Indeed, when I got
down to the Boompjes, and boarded the craft lying at anchor there, I
think I must have tried five-and-twenty before I could find a skipper
who would as much as look at me, much less offer me a berth. "If you
please, do you want a boy?" was my invariable question. Some of the
skippers said that they had more boys than they knew what to do with;
others, that boys were more trouble than they were worth, which worth
did not amount to the salt they ate. Off the poop of one ship I was
kicked by a skipper, who had had too much Schiedam for breakfast; from
the gangway of another I was shoved ashore by a quartermaster, who
didn't like boys; one bo'sun's mate gave me a starting with a
rope's-end, as he swore that I had come aboard to steal something; and
another pulled my ears quite good-naturedly (although he made my ears
very sore), and told me to go back to school, and mind my book, and that
a sailor's life was too rough for me. There was one captain--he was in
the China trade--who said that he would take me as a 'prentice if my
father would pay a hundred and fifty guilders for my indentures; and
another, who offered to ship me as cook's mate; but I knew nothing about
cooking, and had to tell him so, with tears in my eyes. I was nearly
reduced to despair, when one skipper--he was only the master of a
galliot, trading between Rotterdam and Yarmouth, in England--seeing that
I was a stout, bright-eyed lad, likely to be a strong haul on a rope,
and a good hand at a winch or a windlass, told me that he would take me
on first for one voyage, and see what wages I was worth when we came
back again. He advanced me a guilder or two, to buy some sea-going
things; so that, with the trifle my father had given me, when he
dismissed me with his blessing and a thrashing, I did not go to sea
absolutely penniless.

I have been at sea sixty years; yet well do I recollect the first day
that I shipped on board the galliot _Jungvrauw_, at Rotterdam, bound for
Great Yarmouth, England. When I got on board the vessel was just
wearing out of port, and, thinking that about the best thing I could do
was to begin to make mys