her to, under a lashed helm, every time I had occasion to leave the
deck.

The seaworthiness of the craft, coupled with the reasonable assurance of
presently falling in with a ship, rendered me so far easy in my mind as
to enable me to think very frequently of the treasure and how I was to
secure it. If I fell in with an enemy's cruiser or a privateer I must
expect to be stripped. This would be the fortune of war, and I must take
my chance. My concern did not lie that way; how was I to protect this
property, that was justly mine, against my own countrymen, suppose I had
the good fortune to carry the schooner safely into English waters? I had
a brother-in-law, Jeremiah Mason, Esq., a Turkey merchant in a small way
of business, whose office was in the City of London, and, if I could
manage to convey the treasure secretly to him, he would, I knew, find me
a handsome account in his settlement of this affair. But it was
impossible to strike out a plan. I must wait and attend the course of
events. Yet riches being things which fever the coldest imaginations, I
could not look ahead without excitement and irritability of fancy, I
should reckon it a hard fate indeed after my cruel experiences, my
freeing the vessel from the ice, my sailing her through some thousand of
miles of perilous seas, and arriving finally in safety, to be
dispossessed of what was strictly mine--as much mine as if I had fished
it up from the bottom of the sea, where it must otherwise have lain till
the crack of doom.

I remember that, among other ideas, it entered my head to tell the
master of the first ship I met, if she were British, the whole story of
my adventure, to acquaint him with the treasure, to offer to tranship it
and myself to his vessel and abandon the schooner, and to propose a
handsome reward for his offices. But I could not bring my mind to trust
any stranger with so great a secret. The mere circumstance of the
treasure not being mine, in the sense of my having earned it, of its
being piratical plunder, and as much one's as another's, might dull the
edge even of a fair-dealing conscience and expose me to the machinations
of a heavily tempted mind.

Therefore, though I had no plan, I was resolved at all hazards to stick
to the schooner, and, with a view to providing against the curiosity or
rummaging of any persons who should come aboard I fell to the following
work after getting my breakfast. I hung lanthorns in the run and
hatchways