Gulliver tells us that it is his "Fortune" to travel after he has gone to study at Emanuel College in Cambridge (from age fourteen to seventeen) as well as after he has been apprenticed to Mr. James Bates for four years. Therefore, we can understand him to be about twenty-one years old when he is making decisions to learn as much as he possibly can about the kinds of knowledge most needed for those who undertake voyages. However, what he says is that he has "always believed" that it would be his fortune to travel at some time or another, and so he must have actually had this realization at a very young age, so young that he cannot remember a time before it because he says now that he's always known it.
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