Leaving Yale to the more studious, no doubt the young man enjoyed this brief period of home-life and the distinguished guests drawn by its hospitality to Otsego Hall.  Yet even this could not for long hold him there.  Perhaps he was influenced by what he heard from them of the great outside world, and he, too, wished to see what it was like.  As a stepping-stone to a commission in the navy, Judge Cooper secured a berth for his son, who shipped as a sailor before-the-mast in the Stirling, of Wiscasset, Maine, John Johnston master and part owner.  In the care of a merchant, young Cooper went down to the docks to look about the ship and sign the articles, and the next day he returned in his sailor’s garb.  The Stirling was taken into the stream, and his new comrades, a mixture of nations,—­four Americans, a Portuguese, a Spaniard, a Prussian, a Dane, an Englishman, a Scotch boy, and a Canadian,—­tumbled aboard, not quite themselves; but by night they were in working trim.  The young commander was described as “kind and considerate of all hands,” and the ship as “carrying a motley crew.”  When “all hands” were called to get the Stirling under way, Cooper, with another boy, was sent aloft to loose the foretopsail.  With eager will he tugged stoutly at “the robbins,” when the second mate appeared just in time to prevent him from dropping his part of the sail into the top.  The good-hearted mate had a kindly mind for the “new hand,” and the men were too busy to notice small failures aloft.  Young Cooper soon found an old salt who taught him to knot and splice with the best of them, and old Barnstable was repaid for these lessons by the merry times they had together when they got ashore.  However, with her cargo of flour, the Stirling sailed from New York in the autumn of 1806 for the English market at Cowes, and therefore when Cooper should have been taking his class degree at Yale, he was outward bound on the sea’s highway.  Being to the manor born did not admit the sailor before-the-mast to the captain’s cabin, but no doubt the long, rough voyage of forty stormy days did make of the young man a jolly tar.  Through her usual veil of fog came Cooper’s first view of Old England when threatened with Napoleon’s invasion.  Forty-odd sail of warships were sighted by the night-watch when the Stirling passed the straits of Dover at daybreak.  They gave the young man an object-lesson that he never forgot, in the watchfulness and naval power of Great Britain.  The Stirling had but dropped anchor in English waters when she was boarded by a British man-of-war’s boat-crew, and one of her best hands was forced into the English navy service, and another sailor barely escaped, he having satisfactory papers.  At London a third hand was lost, and Captain Johnston himself was seized by a press-gang.

[Illustration:  GIBRALTAR.]