At 19 I was a man, not a young man but a grown man, and any one who has followed the sea will know what that means. The sea ripens a man early, ripens him and fixes his mind for good or for evil, according to his capacity to understand the life about him. Nowadays on shore I see young fellows of 19 that are not much better than children, except that they have stretched enough to wear long trousers. That is the life of the land, where such a thing as responsibility seems to be unknown until men have begun to decay. I was not that way; and if I had had a better mind I might have made a success of life. I think I would have been successful ashore, anyway, for I was quick and clever and never shirked work; but mostly I think so because I was hard and young and brazen. I knew how to fight and I knew how to bluff. Ashore, it would have been enough to know how to bluff, I should not have had to fight. At sea a man cannot succeed, permanently, without actual worth and fighting and winning. On the land, so far as my observation goes, actual worth is by no means necessary to success. Any number of things may make a landsman successful; he may acquire money or fame and his success is measured by what of these things he has acquired; it is not measured by the stuff in him, as it is at sea, but by what he gets hold of; and if he cannot keep hold of it he becomes a failure again, though he is no worse a man than before. Landsmen do not value the man but what he has. By that measure I have become, I suppose, a pretty successful person ashore; I, who was a disgrace to salt water, can hold up my head here with some of the best of them. I am not famous, it is true, but I have a fortune of $200,000 more or less, a pretty considerable figure in these days. At 19 I was a ship’s officer and at 21 I was a first mate. It was then, on my first passage as chief officer, that the first of a series of events which I have to relate occurred. The ship on which I was then was the fast clipper _China Castle_, John Hawkins, master, and the passage was from Boston to Shanghai. Captain Hawkins was a young man in years, like myself--about 26, I think. He had sailed the _China Castle_ between New York and San Francisco at the time of the California gold rush and was now taking her out on her first passage to the East. At last she was to be put into the tea trade, for which she had been built, but from which she had been taken from her very launching for the immensely profitable California route. Besides myself and Captain Hawkins there was in the cabin Mrs. Hawkins, his young wife; she is the only other person aft who matters in my story. She had not been married to Captain Hawkins long, only a year or so, and this was her first passage with him and a sort of deferred honeymoon.