Transcriber’s Note: Italics are enclosed in _underscores_. Additional notes will be found near the end of this ebook. CAPTAINS OF ADVENTURE [Illustration: NAPOLEON BONAPARTE] CAPTAINS OF ADVENTURE _By_ ROGER POCOCK _Author of_ A Man in the Open, etc. ILLUSTRATED WITH PORTRAITS INDIANAPOLIS THE BOBBS-MERRILL COMPANY PUBLISHERS COPYRIGHT 1913 THE BOBBS-MERRILL COMPANY PRESS OF BRAUNWORTH & CO. BOOKBINDERS AND PRINTERS BROOKLYN, N. Y. ADVENTURERS What is an adventurer? One who has adventures? Surely not. A person charged by a wild rhinoceros is having an adventure, yet however wild the animal, however wild the person, he is only somebody wishing himself at home, not an adventurer. In dictionaries the adventurer is “one who seeks his fortune in new and hazardous or perilous enterprises.” But outside the pages of a dictionary, the man who seeks his fortune, who really cares for money and his own advantage, sits at some desk deriding the fools who take thousand-to-one chances in a gamble with Death. Did the patron saint of adventurers, Saint Paul, or did Saint Louis, or Francis Drake, or Livingstone, or Gordon seek their own fortune, think you? In real life the adventurer is one who seeks, not his fortune, but the new and hazardous or perilous enterprises. There are holy saints and scoundrels among adventurers, but all the thousands I have known were fools of the romantic temperament, dealing with life as an artist does with canvas, to color it with fierce and vivid feeling, deep shade and radiant light, exulting in the passions of the sea, the terrors of the wilderness, the splendors of sunshine and starlight, the exaltation of battle, fire and hurricane.