Excerpt from The Spanish Main: Or Thirty Days on the Caribbean I Was born in the City of New York, and spent nearly the whole of the early part of my life in that great metropolis. In my school-boy days it was my infinite delight to roam and linger along the docks and watch the stately ships as they came and went, or as they lay at their piers discharging or taking in cargo. As I gazed at the tapering masts and spars and saw the sailors running up and down the shrouds and ratlins like squirrels, or clinging to the cross-yards like spiders on a wall, I wished that I could be a sailor. But as I grew older, and by education came to know the hardships and privations of a sailor's life as well as its perils, and more especially as I reflected upon his necessitated seclusion from the society of those he dearly loves, and which tends so much toward making up the sum of human happiness, I was easily persuaded to relinquish the desire to adopt a seafaring life. But my love for the ocean and my longings to visit foreign shores grew no less as the years sped on. I fed my passion on the entrancing sea novels of Cooper and Maryatt. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.