Yarned Sea: As a child and a romance lover at sea for years, when the whole hopes and expectation keeps declining, can you challenge it (English Edition)

Its eight years have been at sea. As a boy, innate love of romance and Marryat's novels had sent me there. Otherwise, there was no particular necessity for such a step. My father held the living of Compton-on-Tor in South Devon, and was rich enough to have given me a choice of professions. Nor in all those eight years did I once encounter the romance I had fondly imagined was the inevitable lot of the seafarer—the romance of incident. Indeed, a more humdrum, matter-of-fact life could scarcely be conceived, with its inevitable recurrence of headwinds and fair, gales and calms, long passages and short. Actually, so far as my memory serves me, throughout those years the most exciting matter that happened was the carrying away of an upper foretopsail-yard. Still, if I was not altogether satisfied with the regular routine of the hard monotonous profession I had so willfully chosen, I loved the sea itself beyond anything, and was never tired of studying its myriad moods, and attempting to interpret the language of many tongues with which it spoke to the wanderers upon its mighty breast.