Off to Sea: The Adventures of Jovial Jack Junker on his Road to Fame

From my earliest days I have been known as Jovial Jack Junker. I got the name, I believe, from always being in good humour, and seeing the bright side of things. Whatever I ate did me good, and I never had had an hour’s sickness in my life; while if things happened to go wrong one day, I knew they would go right the next. People said I was of a happy disposition; I suppose I was. I always felt inclined to be singing or whistling, and when I did not, it was because I knew I ought to keep silence—in church, for instance, or in the presence of my elders, who happened to be engaged in conversation. Still, I was not born, as the saying is, with a silver spoon in my mouth, nor did I possess any great worldly advantages. I did not trouble myself much about the future, I must confess that. If I got what I wanted, I was contented; if not, I expected to get it the next day or the day after. I could wait; I always found something to amuse me in the meantime. My father was a marine—a man well known to fame, though not the celebrated “Cheeks.” He was known as Sergeant Junker. He had several small sons and daughters—young Junkers—and when I was about twelve years of age, he was left an inconsolable widower by the untimely death of our inestimable mother. She was an excellent woman, and had brought us up, to the best of her ability, in a way to make us good and useful members of society. She was indeed a greater loss to us than to our poor father; for, as my elder brother Simon observed, as he rubbed his eyes, moist with tears, with the back of his hand—
“You see, Jack, father can go and get another wife, as many do; but we can’t get another mother like her that is gone, that we can’t, nohow.”
No more thorough testimony could have been given to the virtues of our mother. She was a superior woman in many respects, and she was of a very respectable family, and had a nice little fortune of her own; but she had the common weakness of her sex, and fell in love with the handsome face of our honest, worthy father, Ben Junker the marine, at the time a private in that noble corps. She did not like his name, but she loved him, and overcame her prejudice. He could, at the period I speak of, scarcely read or write; but she set to work to educate him, and so far succeeded, that, being a very steady man, he rose in due course to be a sergeant. She had the ambition of hoping to see him obtain a commission; but he used to declare that, if he did, nothing would make him more unhappy, as he should feel exactly like a fish out of water. He was thus, at the time of which I am speaking, still a sergeant. Our mother, in consequence of the income she enjoyed, was able to give her children a much better education than we should otherwise probably have obtained. At the time of her death, it would have been difficult to find in our rank of life a more happy, contented, and better-conducted family. Our father, as I have said, was at first inconsolable; but he was of a happy, contented disposition, as it is very necessary that marines, as well as other people, should be—a disposition which I fortunately inherited from him. He took the rough with the smooth in life, as a matter of course. A favourite song of his, which he used to hum, was—