The Coral Island

CHAPTER ONE.

BEGINNING--MY EARLY LIFE AND CHARACTER--I THIRST FOR ADVENTURE IN
FOREIGN LANDS, AND GO TO SEA.

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 mere 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 foaming bosom of the broad Atlantic Ocean. My father was a
sea-captain; my grandfather was a sea-captain; my great-grandfather had
been a marine. Nobody could tell positively 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
watery 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 disposition.
Soon after I was born, my father, being old, retired 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 chubby
knees by walking on them, and made many attempts to stand up and walk
like a man--all of which attempts, however, resulted in my sitting down
violently and in sudden surprise. One day I took advantage of my dear
mother's absence to make another effort; and, to my joy, I actually
succeeded in reaching the doorstep, over which I tumbled into a pool of
muddy water that lay before my father's cottage door. Ah, how vividly I
remember the horror of my poor mother when she found me sweltering in
the mud amongst a group of cackling ducks, and the tenderness with which
she stripped off my dripping clothes and washed my dirty little body!
From this time forth my rambles became more frequent and, as I grew
older, more distant, until at last I had wandered far and near on the
shore and in the woods around our humble dwelling, and did not rest
content until my father bound me apprentice to a coasting-vessel and let
me go to sea.