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The Story.* "My birth was unpropitious. I came into the world branded and denounced as a vagrant; for I was a younger son of a family so proud of their antiquity that even gout and mortgaged estates were traced many generations back." This extravagantly injured First Person did not go into the garden and eat worms. He grew up a violent, strongwilled, liberty-loving strapper. He reviled his cruel parents, tortured his tutors and was sent to sea. Just missing the battle of Trafalgar, he was shipped on a training cruise. At Bombay he deserted, nearly destroying a superior officer with fists, feet and a billiard cue. He cast in his lot with a Dutch pirate-merchant, one De Ruyter, a highly cultured, sagacious gentleman of fortune who had fought for George Washington and was now, under Napoleon's tricolor, pillaging Britain's Indian trade. De Ruyter looked Arab, so our hero straightway stained his body and shaved his poll, all but the top-lock for houris to pull him into paradise by. He was given an Arab "grab brig" with an ancient Arab quartermaster, a blood-thirsty Dutch sawbones, a bag-bellied French cook, an Arab and Malay crew and numerous cannon. Already proficient with pistol, dirk and cutlass, he acquired dexterity with assorted oriental cutlery, and in four astonishing years (the last of his 'teens) he spilt and lost blood enough to have satiated a large-sized Hyrcanian tiger. His plunderings read like an inventory of all Eastern bazaars, treasure vaults and shipyards laid end to end. He entered upon an excessively romantic married life with a sloe-eyed Arab orphan, Zela, whom he rescued from a throat-cutting in a Madagascar pirate nest and took on most of his wild voyages. He returned to England when he was just of age. The Significance. The exploits of this man, if invented, would have taxed the combined imaginations of Baron Münchausen, Lord Byron and Scheherazade. His nature was a tumultuous decoction of these three with defiant Ajax, malicious Slovenly Peter, vituperative H. L. Mencken and a violent superman complex superadded. This autobiography of his youth has undoubtedly a rangy skeleton of fact, but it is fleshed, tattooed and caparisoned in the wildly exotic mode of a Byronic travelog. For example, what may have been a couple of native women coming alongside in a canoe in the Sunda Islands, he sets down as a multitude of Moorish mermaids swimming offshore "like a shoal of walruses" and boarding his ship "in all directions." Off Celebes, a giant swordfish slays a monster blue shark, while seven other huge sharks look on. A lumbering Chinese junk is brought to off the Borneo coast and the ensuing description reads like a sacking of Peking. Aiming to amaze by his deeds in life, he succeeds in amazing by his deeds in literature. "Ordinary events during a voyage do not bear relating," he says, and rushes on with extraordinary ones—burning a house of joy outside Bombay, riding out a simoon off Borneo, spearing wild boars on He de France, firing pistols into savages' mouths —in writing that for sheer spectacular vehemence has no equal (unless it is Herman Melville's) in the language. The book is now republished for the first time since 1890. The Author. Edward John Trelawny was 39 in 1831 when he wrote and published this book. Since returning to England as told in his narrative, he had married