. They looked for treachery
behind every bush and billow; the only chance of safety lay, they
maintained, in holding every white man to be an assassin and every red
man a cannibal until they were proved otherwise.

The boy was hired by Captain Kirle to wait upon him. His name was John
Hilliard, and he was precisely what any of these good-humored,
mischievous fellows outside would have been, hired on a brigantine two
centuries ago; disposed to shirk his work in order to stand gaping at
Black Ben fishing, or to rub up secretly his old cutlass for the behoof
of Kidd, or the French when they should come, while the Indian Venus
stood by looking on, with the baby in her arms.

The aged man is invariably set down as chief of the company, though the
captain held all the power and the Quaker all the money. But white hair
and a devout life gave an actual social rank in those days, obsolete now,
and Robert Barrow was known as a man of God all along the
coast-settlements from Massachusetts to Ashley River, among whites and
Indians. Years before, in Yorkshire, his inward testimony (he being a
Friend) had bidden him go preach in this wilderness. He asked of God, it
is said, rather to die; but was not disobedient to the heavenly call,
and came and labored faithfully. He was now returning from the West
Indies, where he had carried his message a year ago.

The wind set fair for the first day or two; the sun was warm. Even the
grim Quaker Dickenson might have thought the white-sailed fleet a pretty
sight scudding over the rolling green plain, if he could have spared
time to his jealous eyes from scanning the horizon for pirates. Our baby,
too, saw little of sun or sea; for, being but a sickly baby, with hardly
vitality enough to live from day to day, it was kept below, smothered in
the finest of linens and the softest of paduasoy.

One morning when the fog lifted, Dickenson's watch for danger was
rewarded. They had lost their way in the night; the fleet was gone, the
dead blue slopes of water rolled up to the horizon on every side and
were met by the dead blue sky, without the break of a single sail or the
flicker of a flying bird. For fifteen days they beat about without any
apparent aim other than to escape the enemies whom they hourly expected
to leap out from behind the sky-line. On the sixteenth day friendly
signs were made to them from shore. "A fire made a great Smoak, and
People beckoned to us to putt on Shoar," but Kirle and