He has stated in his autobiography that through all his early years of struggle, when he was successively grocer's apprentice at Fiirstenberg, cabin-boy on the "Dorothea" bound for Venezuela, and, after her wreck, office attendant and then book-keeper in Amsterdam, he nourished a passion for the Homeric story and an ambition to become a great linguist.
He studied at Harvard from 1766 to 1768, when he went to sea as a cabin boy.
He's the cabin boy on board the luxury airship, the Aurora.