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 mere¹ 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 on which I was born on the foaming² bosom³ of the broad Atlantic Ocean. My father was a sea-captain; my grandfather was a sea-captain; my great-grandfather had been a marine⁴. Nobody could tell positively⁵ 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 any rate, we knew that as far back as our family could be traced, it had been intimately connected with the great watery⁶ waste. Indeed, this was the case on both sides of the house; for my mother always went to sea with my father on his long voyages, and so spent the greater part of her life upon the water.

 

Thus it was, I suppose, that I came to inherit a roving disposition⁷. Soon after I was born, my father, being old, retired⁸ from a seafaring life, purchased a small cottage in a fishing village on the west coast of England, and settled down to spend the evening of his life on the shores of that sea which had for so many years been his home. It was not long after this that I began to show the roving spirit that dwelt within me. For some time past my infant legs had been gaining strength, so that I came to be dissatisfied with rubbing the skin off my

分享到：