Famous Privateersmen and Adventurers of the Sea Their rovings, cruises, escapades, and fierce battling upon the ocean for patriotism and for treasure

My dear Boys:—The sea stretches away from the land,—a vast sheet of unknown possibilities. Now gray, now blue, now slate colored, whipped into a thousand windrows by the storm, churned into a seething mass of frothing spume and careening bubbles, it pleases, lulls, then terrorizes and dismays. Perpetually intervening as a barrier between peoples and their countries, the wild, sobbing ocean rises, falls and roars in agony. It is a stoppage to progress and contact between races of men and warring nations.

In the breasts of all souls slumbers the fire of adventure. To penetrate the unknown, to there find excitement, battle, treasure, so that one’s future life can be one of ease and indolence—for this men have sacrificed the more stable occupations on land in order to push recklessly across the death-dealing billows. They have battled with the elements; they have suffered dread diseases; they have been tormented with thirst; with a torrid sun and with strange weather; they have sorrowed and they have sinned in order to gain fame, fortune, and renown. On the wide sweep of the ocean, even as on the rolling plateau of the once uninhabited prairie, many a harrowing tragedy has been enacted. These dramas have often had no chronicler,—the battle was fought out in the silence of the [Pg viii]watery waste, and there has been no tongue to tell of the solitary conflict and the unseen strife.

• АвторCharles Haven Ladd Johnston
• ВидавництвоProject Gutenberg
• Рік видання2008 р.
• Оригінальна назваFamous Privateersmen and Adventurers of the Sea Their rovings, cruises, escapades, and fierce battling upon the ocean for patriotism and for treasure
• Тип книгиЕлектронна книга