Page:Twenty years before the mast - Charles Erskine, 1896.djvu/10



ask you, as you read the following pages, to bear in mind that I have been only a common sailor  before the mast. I trust you will expect from me, therefore, nothing higher in eloquence than a seaman’s language. I have stood before no professor’s chair, no classic lore has been instilled into my mind, I have  received no college or even common school education,  nor am I indebted in any way to literary studies for such  knowledge of men and things as I may possess. My ideas are my own — not the reflex of another’s mind. The world has been my school, and from the book of nature have I taken all my lessons.

For twenty years I sailed the ocean under our country’s flag, whose broad stripes and bright stars have floated to  the breeze in every clime; and on every shore I visited  I found something grand or wonderful, beautiful or  sublime, that photographed itself upon my memory. From earliest boyhood my heart went out in admiring love towards those great navigators whose discoveries