Jack in the Forecastle; or, Incidents in the Early Life of Hawser Martingale.

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Sleeper was an American sailor, journalist, and politician who was Mayor of Roxbury, Mass., and a member of the Mass. Senate. As a novelist he used the pseudonym of Mawser Martingale, and I suspect this book is autobiographical fiction. He went to sea as a cabin boy in 1809, age 15, and the book is about his first command in the merchant marine in 1821.