"As to the name, Gen. Goicouria, a Spanish hidalgo from Cuba, tells me it is Castilian, and is spelled in the same way as the old physician's--Farraguth." Admiral David Glascoe Farragut was born at Campbell's Station, in East Tennessee, in 1801. While only a little boy, at nine years of age, his father, who had been a friend and shipmate of the hardy sea-king, Commodore Porter, procured him a midshipman's berth under that commander, and the boy, accompanying Porter in the romantic cruise of the Essex, served a right desperate apprenticeship to his hazardous profession. His first sea-fight was the short fierce combat of Porter in the Essex, on April 13th, 1812, with the English sloop-of-war, Alert. No sooner did the Alert spy the Essex, than she ran confidently close upon her weather quarter, and with three cheers opened her broadside. Porter, not a whit abashed, replied with such swift fury that the Englishman, smashed into drowning helplessness, and with seven feet of water in his hold, struck his colors in eight minutes, escaping out of the fight by surrender even more hastily than he had gone into it. In that desperate and bloody fight in Valparaiso harbor, when the British captain Hillyar, with double the force of the Essex, and by means of a most discreditable breach of the law of neutrality, made an end of the Essex, Midshipman Farragut, twelve years of age, stood by his commander to the very last. When those who could swim ashore had been ordered overboard, Porter himself, having helped work the few remaining guns that could be fired, hauled down his flag, and surrendered the bloody wreck that was all he had left under him, for the sake of the helpless wounded men who must have sunk along with him. Farragut was wounded, and was sent home with the other officers of the ship, on parole; and Porter, in his report to the Secretary of the Navy, made special and honorable mention of the lad, and mentioned with the appropriate regret of a just and brave man, that the boy was "too young for promotion." Probably not another living man on the face of the earth had so early and so thorough a baptism of blood and fire, and bore himself through it so manlike.