THE BOY CAPTAIN

OR

FROM FORECASTLE TO CABIN

 

CHAPTER I.
AN IMAGINARY SHIPWRECK.

HE ship Sportsman, from New York for Hong

Kong, had, on this particular morning in January,
nearly completed what had thus far proven a most
uneventful voyage.

The youngest sailor on board, who was the son of the
captain and lacking a few months of being twenty-one
years old, was looking forward eagerly to this his first
visit to China.

Although having performed his duties as one of the
crew during two years and a half, he had seen nothing
especially strange or wonderful in those ports which the
Sportsman visited; but the very name “Hong Kong”
was associated with such grotesque things as green drag-
ons with red tails, kites fashioned in fantastic shapes, and
the oddest kind of odd people in the most impossible of