o compete in the
world's commerce, and it is nothing against the master mariner if the
birthplace mentioned on his certificate be Nova Scotia. I was born in
a cold spot, on coldest North Mountain, on a cold February 20, though
I am a citizen of the United States--a naturalized Yankee, if it may
be said that Nova Scotians are not Yankees in the truest sense of the
word. On both sides my family were sailors; and if any Slocum should
be found not seafaring, he will show at least an inclination to
whittle models of boats and contemplate voyages. My father was the
sort of man who, if wrecked on a desolate island, would find his way
home, if he had a jack-knife and could find a tree. He was a good
judge of a boat, but the old clay farm which some calamity made his
was an anchor to him. He was not afraid of a capful of wind, and he
never took a back seat at a camp-meeting or a good, old-fashioned
revival.

As for myself, the wonderful sea charmed me from the first. At the age
of eight I had already been afloat along with other boys on the bay,
with chances greatly in favor of being drowned. When a lad I filled
the important post of cook on a fishing-schooner; but I was not long in
the galley, for the crew mutinied at the appearance of my first duff,
and "chucked me out" before I had a chance to shine as a culinary
artist. The next step toward the goal of happiness found me before the
mast in a full-rigged ship bound on a foreign voyage. Thus I came
"over the bows," and not in through the cabin windows, to the command
of a ship.

My best command was that of the magnificent ship _Northern Light_, of
which I was part-owner. I had a right to be proud of her, for at that
time--in the eighties--she was the finest American sailing-vessel
afloat. Afterward I owned and sailed the _Aquidneck_, a little bark
which of all man's handiwork seemed to me the nearest to perfection of
beauty, and which in speed, when the wind blew, asked no favors of
steamers, I had been nearly twenty years a shipmaster when I quit her
deck on the coast of Brazil, where she was wrecked. My home voyage to
New York with my family was made in the canoe _Liberdade_, without
accident.

[Illustration: Drawn by W. Taber. The _Northern Light_, Captain Joshua
Slocum, bound for Liverpool, 1885.]

My voyages were all foreign. I sailed as freighter and trader
principally to China, Australia, and Japan, and among the Spice
Islands. Mine was not the sort of life to mak