Redburn: His First Voyage. Being the Sailor Boy Confessions and Reminiscences of the Son-of-a-Gentleman in the Merchant Service

A gentleman's son with no money signs on as a boy before the mast for the Liverpool run, and finds that the sea is a trade like any other, staffed by men who despise him. Melville wrote it in ten weeks for money, called it beggarly work done to buy tobacco, and produced the truest account of a first voyage in American literature - the starving family in the Liverpool cellar is the passage no reader forgets.