At the Back of the World, Wanderings over Many Lands and Seas

Excerpt: "As far back as I can remember the sea had a strange fascination for me, and if, as is the custom with old people to ask a boy, however small, what he is going to be when he is a man, I invariably answered “a sailor of course.” At school the lessons I liked best were geography, and the only books that interested me were those that told of travel in foreign lands. Born in Liverpool, that c...