Before commencing his own story, young Jonathan Romer introduces us to his ancestors, and asserts his right to a life of adventure. "Descended on both sides of the house from some of the earliest settlers of Nantucket, and more or less intimately related to the Coffins, the Folgers, the Macys, and the Starbucks of that adventurous population, it would seem that I had a natural right to a roving disposition, and to a life of peril, privation, and vicissitude. Nearly all the male members of my family, for several generations, have been followers of the sea: some of them in the calm and peaceful employment of the merchant-service; others, and by far the greater number, in the more dangerous pursuit of the ocean monster." After relating some of the feats of his family, and glancing at his own childhood, which gave early indications of the bold and restless spirit that animated him at a mature period, Jonathan presents himself to his readers at the age of eighteen--a stalwart stripling and idle student; the best rider, shot, swimmer, and leaper for many miles around, with little taste for books, and a very decided one for rambling in the woods with rifle and rod. At this time the academy, of which he had for four years been an inmate, is nearly broken up by what is called "a revival of religion;" in other words, a violent fit of fanatical enthusiasm, provoked and fed by Baptist and Methodist preachers. Pupils and teachers alike go mad with fervent zeal, classes are at an end, unceasing prayer is substituted for study, and Jonathan, who ls one of the few unregenerated, walks into the forest, and knocks the head off a partridge with a rifle-ball. The bird is picked up, and the excellence of the aim applauded by an old trapper and hunter, Joe Downs by name, well known along the shores of the Rackett and Grass rivers, in the northern and uninhabited part of the state of New York. Joe is not the wild, semi-Indian trapper of the south and west, whom Sealsfield and Ruxton have so graphically sketched; there is as much difference between the two characters as between a sailor in the coasting trade and a Pacific Ocean beachcomber. There is nothing of the half-horse, half-alligator style about Joe, whose manner is so mild, and his coat so decent, that he has been taken for a country parson. He despises the Redskins, sets no value on their scalps, and would not shed their blood, except in self-defence. How he had once been thus compelled to do so, he relates to Jonathan in the course of their first conversation.