Excerpt from Thirty Years at Sea: The Story of a Sailor's Life Nearly all the incidents and scenes depicted in this book have been derived from the writer's own experience or from the relations of actors and eyewitnesses. Nothing in it is matter of pure invention except as to arrangement and the connecting links necessary to preserve the continuity of the narrative, fragments of which have given entertainment to so many listeners, old and young, as to encourage the hope that in a connected form it might interest a wider circle. The chapters describing the fight between the Monitor and the Merrimac, and the capture of Fort Fisher, have, in a slightly altered form, already appeared in Lippincott's Magazine, where they were divested of their connection with the hero of the narrative, and became a strictly accurate account of facts which came under the writer's observation. 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 techlogy 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.