William Gifford was born in 1755, at Ashburton, in Devonshire, England, and for several years led the miserable kind of life which is common among the children of a drunken and reckless father. His father died when only forty years of age, leaving his wife with two children, the youngest little more than eight months old, and no available means for their support. In about a year afterward his wife followed, and thus was William, at the age of thirteen, and his infant brother, thrown upon the world in an utterly destitute condition. The parish workhouse now received the younger of the orphans, and William was taken home to the house of a person named Carlile, his godfather, who, whatever might have been his kindness in this respect, had at least taken care of his own interests, by seizing on every article left by the widow Gifford, on pretence of repaying himself for money which he had advanced to her, in her greatest necessities. The only benefit derived by William from this removal was a little education; as Carlile sent him to school, where he acquired the elements of instruction. His chief proficiency, as he tells us, was in arithmetic; but he was not suffered to make much progress in his studies, for, grudging the expense, his patron took him from school, with the object of making him a ploughboy. To the plough he would accordingly have gone, but for a weakness in his chest, the result of an accident some years before. It was now proposed to send him to a storehouse in Newfoundland; but the person who was to be benefited by his services declared him to be too small, and this plan was also dropped. “My godfather,” says William, “had now humbler views for me, and I had little heart to resist anything. He proposed to send me on board one of the Torbay fishing-boats. I ventured, however, to remonstrate against this, and the matter was compromised by my consenting to go on board a coaster. A coaster was speedily found for me at Brixham, and thither I went, when little more than thirteen.” In this vessel he remained for nearly a year. “It will be easily conceived,” he remarks, “that my life was a life of hardship, I was not only a ‘ship-boy on the high and giddy mast,’ but also in the cabin, where every menial office fell to my lot; yet if I was restless and discontented, I can safely say it was not so much on account of this, as of my being precluded from all possibility of reading; as my master did not possess, nor do I recollect seeing, during the whole time of my abode with him, a single book of any description except the ‘Coasting Pilot.’”