To Washington the romance of the sea was represented by the tobacco-ship creeping up the river and bringing all the luxuries and many of the necessaries of life from vaguely distant countries.

No doubt he wished to go on one of these vessels and try his luck, and very possibly the royal navy was hoped for as the ultimate result.

The effort was certainly made to send him to sea, but it failed, and he went back to school to study more mathematics.
Apart from the fact that the exact sciences in moderate degree were about all that Mr.Williams could teach, this branch of learning had an immediate practical value, inasmuch as surveying was almost the only immediately gainful pursuit open to a young Virginia gentleman, who sorely needed a little ready money that he might buy slaves and work a plantation.

So Washington studied on for two years more, and fitted himself to be a surveyor.

There are still extant some early papers belonging to this period, chiefly fragments of school exercises, which show that he already wrote the bold, handsome hand with which the world was to become familiar, and that he made geometrical figures and notes of surveys with the neatness and accuracy which clung to him in all the work of his life, whether great or small.