Upon one instance of a story being recounted, one man took particular notice of Amador’s enamored expression. After the story was over, the man called Amador over and introduced himself as Charles Beck, a local resident who also found a love of the stories the sailors would tell. Charles showed Amador a large leatherbound journal in which he wrote down the tales he heard, compiling all of them for future retellings. Amador, his family being relatively poor, was unable to read the stories written in this journal. Charles offered to teach him how to read and write, with the stipulation that if a good story was being told and he wasn’t present for it, Amador had to document it himself to pass along to Charles the next time he came in. And thus began Amador’s tutelage.
On the days when visitors were scarce, and stories scarcer, Amador began to make up his own stories, inspired by the tales told in the tavern and the legends the sailors shared. Slowly he began to fill a number of journals of his own, the stories he created becoming indiscernible from the tales spun around the tavern tables.
After a while, writing down the stories and creating his own wasn’t enough for him. At first, he began to draw his own rudimentary maps of the places described in the sailors’ stories. But as he grew older and started to take on responsibilities within the tavern, he would spend his earnings at the local cartographer, buying maps from around the world and learning how to read and navigate them. His parents would occasionally berate him for focusing more on the stories being told than his responsibilities around the tavern, such as cleaning and cooking. But at the same time, they didn’t want to stifle his wonder and awe at the world as a whole, so they were never too insistent upon it, save for if there was a rush.
As he got older, he took on more and more responsibilities around the tavern. When he was twenty-two, his mother succumbed to illness. A year to the day later, his father passed as well, a broken heart being the best guess for the cause, leaving the tavern to Amador to run on his own. While he dutifully continued to run the tavern, the desire to see the world and the multitude of wonders it contained remained, gnawing at his mind.
Nearly a decade after he became the sole owner of the tavern, the tavern was lost in a fire, along with a number of other buildings in the near vicinity. In his escape from the flames, he managed to save a box in which he kept a number of the maps he had acquired over the years. His stories, along with the rest of his belongings, were all sadly lost to the flames.
With nothing left to keep him in his hometown, he found himself work on a ship as a cook, and left to sail the world, documenting the adventures as they happened, and sharpening his cartography, making maps of the places they visited.
