Emma Watts Phillips
"Richard Galbraith, Mariner"
"Life among the Kaffirs"
Chapter One.
A Word about Myself and Home.
I was born, as near as I can calculate, in the year 1801, at the time of the Equinoctial gales, a fact which made the old fisherwives present at my birth declare that I was marked out by the finger of Providence for a sailor.
To confirm them, as it seemed, on this point, when the winds, with a whirling rush, used to shriek around my parent’s cottage, that clung, limpet like to the face of the rocks which sheltered the little Cornish fishing village, I, baby as I was, used to shriek in unison, not from fear or pain, but unmitigated delight at, and sympathy with, its rough, boisterous turmoil.
Certainly as I look back to my early days and what I have heard related of them, the Breton saying, which in my voyages I have come across, “Il a de l’eau de mer autour du coeur,” appeared most true in my case, for the rough shingly beach was my home in stormy weather or fine. (He has the sea water about his heart.)