George Washington

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he set his mind to.
His first real adventure as a boy was going to a surveying party to the Shenandoah Valley of northern Virginia and rising the Shenandoah River by canoe. An earlier suggestion that he should be sent to sea seems to have been discouraged by his uncle Joseph Ball, who described the consequences of a unknown colonial youth in the British Navy of that day as such that "he had better be put apprentice to a tinker. "When he was 17 he was made surveyor of Culpeper County, Virginia, the first public office he held.
In 1751 George had his first and only experience of foreign lands when he joined his half-brother Lawrence to the island of Barbados in the West Indies. Lawrence was really ill with tuberculosis and thought the climate might help, but the trip did not help him in any way. George was exposed with smallpox. He had the scars from the disease for the rest of his life. Fortunately this experience gave him immunity to the disease, which was later to kill colonial ...

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