Young Glasgow Farragut was waiting impatiently to see the Secretary of the Navy. There was a very important question he wanted to ask. At last the door opened, and Captain David Porter called him in.

"This is my adopted son—Glasgow Farragut," the captain said. "Glasgow, what did you want to ask Mr. Secretary?"

Glasgow looked at the carpet. He felt rather shy. Then he said stoutly, "I'd like to have a commission in the United States Navy, sir. I'd like to be a midshipman."

The Secretary of the Navy looked at Glasgow. "Why, you don't quite come to the top of that desk boy! How old are you?"

"I was born in 1801 at Campbell's Station, Tennessee."

"Why, you're only nine years old!" the Secretary said. "A midshipman ought to be fifteen or sixteen, you know. Keep on going to school and then come and talk to me about it again."

But Glasgow didn't have to go to school long. The Secretary was better than his word. Glasgow worked hard, and on Christmas Day, 1810, he received the best present ever—his commission. He was a midshipman, nine and a half years old! He was sorry that he hadn't studied harder so that he might read the print on the commission. Even his own name looked strange to him. It looked like David Glasgow Farragut.

"Haven't they given me your name instead of my own?" he asked the captain.

"I want you to have that name," Captain Porter answered. "If I had a son of my own, I'd call him David."

David Glasgow was proud of his new name as of his new title—Mister Farragut.

He loved sailing on the Essex and the life at sea. He could climb the rigging faster than the larger boys, and he was as surefooted as a cat. David was brave, too. "Three pounds of uniform and seventy pounds of fight," the sailors called him. He had to be brave—he was so much smaller than the other boys. No one ever forgot the day David proved that Murphy the pig was his.

Mister Farragut was lookout for the Essex. It was his duty to report any strange ships on the horizon, or changes in the weather. And he had many things to report when the Essex sailed away to South America and around the dangerous Cape Horn to the Pacific. He was learning all the things that were someday to make him a famous naval hero.

David Glasgow Farragut is one of the greatest names in the history of the United States Navy. He was the first admiral in the United States—the highest rank an officer can attain—the man the torpedoes in Mobile Bay couldn't stop.

David Farragut: Boy Midshipman is an exciting story of adventures, of fighting the elements, enemy vessels, mutiny and starvation on the high seas. Laura Long, author of the popular Oliver Hazard Perry: Boy of the Sea in the Childhood of Famous Americans Series, proves again that she knows just what young readers will enjoy. 

From the dust jacket