I am going to write, not the history of my life, which, on the whole, has been as quiet as most men's, but simply the story of about a year of it, which, I think, will be almost as interesting to other folks as any yarn spun by a professional novel writer; and if I am wrong, it is because I haven't the knowledge such have of the way to tell a story. As a friend of mine, who is an artist, says, I know I can't put in the foreground properly, but if I tell the simple facts in my own way, it will be true, and anything that is really true always seems to me to have a value of its own, quite independent of what the papers call "style," which a sailor, who has never written much besides a log and …
Or read it translated: 日本語 · 中文 · हिन्दी · Español · العربية · Français · বাংলা · Português · Русский · Bahasa Indonesia · اردو · Deutsch · Kiswahili · 한국어