of
no avail for a long time, till at last, with a sad voice, she consented,
when he grew bigger, should he then show a strong wish to go to sea, to
allow him to accompany me.

I met Tommy on my way home and told him that he must make haste and grow
big that he might go to sea and fill his pockets with pearls and
diamonds for his widowed mother. In many a dream which I had thus
conjured up, both by day and night, did the poor lad indulge as he was
scaring off the crows in the fields or lying on his humble pallet in his
thatched-roof hut near Bideford.

It was at Whitsuntide of the year 1764, I then numbering eleven summers,
that I was placed on the books of the Folkstone cutter, commanded by a
particular friend of my father's, Lieutenant Clover; the amount of
learning I possessed on quitting school just enabling me to read a
chapter in the Bible to my old blind grandmother (on my mother's side),
who lived with us, and to tell my father how many times a coachwheel of
any diameter would turn round in going to Penryn. Having received my
father's and mother's blessing and a sea-chest, which contained a
somewhat scanty supply of clothes, a concise epitome of navigation, an
English dictionary, and my grandmother's Bible--the only gift of value
the kind old lady had it in her power to bestow--I was launched forth
into the wide world to take my chance with the bustling, hard-hearted
crowd which fills it. I was speedily removed from the cutter into his
Majesty's packet the Duncannon, Captain Charles Edwards, in which vessel
I crossed the Atlantic for the first time; and after visiting Madeira
and several of the West India Islands I returned to Falmouth on the eve
of Christmas, 1767. I next joined the Duke of York, Captain Dickenson,
in which vessel I made no less than sixteen voyages to Lisbon. As,
however, I had grown very weary of the packet service, I was not sorry
to be paid off and to return once more home, if not with a fuller purse,
at all events, a better sailor than when I left it. I was not long
allowed to enjoy the luxury of idleness before my father got me
appointed to the Torbay, seventy-four, commanded by Captain Walls, who
was considered one of the smartest officers in the service, and I was
taught to expect a very different sort of life to that which I had been
accustomed to in the slow-going packet service. There were several
youngsters from the neighbourhood of Falmouth, who had never before been
to se