My sea-faring experiences covered about eight years, and they hit a traditional period of immense moment--I mean the gradual transformation of the marine fabric from wood into iron. I was always afloat in wood, however, and never knew what it was to have an iron plate between me and the yearning wash of the brine outside until I went on a voyage to Natal and back in a big ocean steamer that all day long throbbed to the maddened heart in her engine room, like some black and gleaming leviathan rendered hysterical by the lances of whalers feeling for its life, and all night stormed through the dark ocean shadow like a body of fire, faster than a gale of wind could in my time have driven the swiftest clipper keel that furrowed blue water.
What hair-breadth escapes did I meet with? I have been asked. Was I ever marooned? Ever cast away, as Jack says, on the top crust of a half-penny loaf? Ever overboard among sharks? Ever gazing madly round the horizon, the sole occupant of a frizzling boat, in search of a ship where I might obtain water to cool my blue and frothing lips? Well, my duff is not a very considerable one, and the few plums in it I fear are almost wide enough apart to be out of hail of one another. However a sample or two will suffice to enable me to keep my word and to write something at all events autobiographic.
