Excerpt from The Essex Institute Historical Collections, 1899, Vol. 35 Benjamin of one hundred and sixty tons burden, and with a cargo consisting principally of merchandise which cost about eighteen thou sand dollars (then considered a large stock for such a ship) for the Cape of Good Hope and India, and with such instructions as left the management of the voyage very much to my own discretion. On leaving home every dollar that I possessed was much less than I wished to leave with my mother for the comfort of herself and family during so long a voyage as I had then undertaken; therefore in addition to all my own small means, I left with her also some money which I hired for that purpose; consequently (as heretofore) I had no property with me beyond what I had hired upon a respondentia-bond, to enable me to pay my five per cent of the cost of the outward cargo, my perquisites, as consignee of the cargo, being to put in five per cent of the outward cargo, and to receive, at the close of the voyage, ten per cent of the return cargo. Neither myself nor the chief mate of the ship for that voyage (mr. Charles Derby) had attained the age of twenty-one years, when we left home on that voyage (i was not then twenty years of age) and it was remarked to me by the naval officer (the late Mr. Wm. Pickman) on taking the ship's papers from the Custom House, that it was the first instance in which papers had been issued from that office to a vessel bound to the East Indies the captain and chief mate of which were both minors. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.