When he was only twelve years old his father contracted to remove the cargo from a ship which had gone ashore near Sandy Hook, and to convey it to New York. The lighters which were to carry the goods to the city could not reach the ship, and it was necessary to haul the cargo, transported in wagons, across the sands from the vessel to them. In spite of his tender age, little Cornelius was placed by his father in charge of the undertaking, which he accomplished promptly and successfully. He loaded his lighters, sent them up to New York, and then started for home with his wagons. Upon reaching South Amboy, where he was to cross over to Staten Island, he found himself, with his wagons, horses, and men, without any money to pay his ferriage across to the island. The ferriage would amount to six dollars, and how he was to raise this sum he was, for a time, at a loss to determine. Finally, he went to the keeper of the tavern, to whom he was a stranger, and asked for the loan of six dollars, offering to leave one of his horses as a pledge for the money, which he promised to return within two days. The tavern-keeper was so well pleased with the boy's energy, that he loaned him the money, and the party crossed over to Staten Island. The pawned horse was promptly redeemed. Young Vanderbilt was always anxious to become a sailor, and, as he approached his seventeenth year, he determined to begin life as a boatman in the harbor of New York. On the 1st of May, 1810, he informed his mother of his determination, and asked her to lend him one hundred dollars to buy a boat. The good lady had always opposed her son's wish to go to sea, and regarded this new scheme as equally hair-brained. As a means of discouraging him, she told him if he would plow, harrow, and plant with corn a certain ten-acre lot belonging to the farm, by the twenty-seventh of that month, on which day he would be seventeen years old, she would lend him the money. The field was the worst in the whole farm; it was rough, hard, and stony; but by the appointed time the work was done, and well done, and the boy claimed and received his money. He hurried off to a neighboring village, and bought his boat, in which he set out for home. He had not gone far, however, when the boat struck a sunken wreck, and filled so rapidly that the boy had barely time to get into shoal water before it sank. [Illustration: VANDERBILT EARNING HIS FIRST HUNDRED DOLLARS.] "Undismayed at this mishap," says Mr. Parton, from whose graphic memoir the leading incidents of this sketch are taken, "he began his new career. His success, as we have intimated, was speedy and great. He made a thousand dollars during each of the next three summers. Often he worked all night; but he was never absent from his post by day, and he soon had the cream of the boating business of the port.