Nathaniel Silsbee, afterwards United States Senator from Massachusetts, was master of a ship in the East India trade before he was twenty-one; while John P.Cushing at the age of sixteen was the sole--and highly successful--representative in China of a large Boston house.

William Sturges, afterwards the head of a great world-wide trading house, shipped at seventeen, was a captain and manager in the China trade at nineteen, and at twenty-nine left the quarter-deck with a competence to establish his firm, which at one time controlled half the trade between the United States and China.

A score of such successes might be recounted.
But the fee which these Yankee boys paid for introduction into their calling was a heavy one.

Dana's description of life in the forecastle, written in 1840, holds good for the conditions prevailing for forty years before and forty after he penned it.

The greeting which his captain gave to the crew of the brig "Pilgrim" was repeated, with little variation, on a thousand quarter-decks: "Now, my men, we have begun a long voyage.