I made, but not after the manner of Gulliver, several voyages into remote nations of the world, and in the eight years I was at sea I picked up enough knowledge to qualify me to give the public a few new ideas about the ocean life. Yet when the scribbling mania possessed me it was long before I could summon courage to write about the sea and sailors. I asked myself, Who is interested in the Merchant Service? What public shall I find to listen to me? Those who read novels want stories about love and elopements, abductions, and the several violations of the sanctities of domestic life. The great mass of readers--those who support the circulating libraries--are ladies. Will it be possible to interest ladies in forecastle life and in the prosaics of the cabin? [Illustration: ANCHORED IN THE DOWNS] Then, again, I was frightened by the Writer for Boys. _He_ was very much at sea. I never picked up a book of his without lighting upon some hideous act of piracy, some astounding and unparalleled shipwreck, some marvellous island of treasure. This writer, of a clan numerous as Wordsworth's 'little lot of stars,' warned me off and affrighted me. His paper ship had so long and successfully filled the public eye that I shrank from launching anything real, anything with strakes and treenails, anything with running rigging so leading that a sailor would exactly know what to let go when the order was given. In plain English, I judged that the sea story had been irremediably depressed, and rendered wholly ridiculous by the strenuous periodic and Christmas labours of the Writer for Boys. Had he not sunk even Marryat and Michael Scott, who, because they wrote about the sea, were compelled in due course by the publishers to address themselves exclusively to boys! The late George Cupples--a man of fine genius--in the course of a letter to me, complained warmly of being made to figure as 'Captain' George Cupples upon the title-page of his admirable work, 'The Green Hand.' He assured me that he was no captain, and that his name thus written was merely a bookseller's dodge to recommend his story to boys.