ship for six weeks.

Where was the land to which the ship would go?
Far, far ahead is all the sailors know!

Harrison does not say into what 'foam of perilous seas, in faery lands
forlorn' the ship went wandering for six mortal weeks. Like Lord
Bateman:

He sailed East, and he sailed West,
Until he came to famed Turkee,
Where he was taken and put in prison,
Till of his life he was wear--ee!

'Then the Master of the ship came and told me, and _the rest who were
in the same condition_, that he discovered three Turkish ships.' 'The
rest who were in the same condition'! We are to understand that a
whole cargo of Harrisons was kidnapped and consigned captive to a
vessel launched on ocean, on the off chance that the captain might
meet three Turkish rovers who would snap them up. At this rate of
carrying on, there must have been disappearances as strange as
Harrison's, from dozens of English parishes, in August 1660. Had a
crew of kidnappers been taking captives for purposes of private fiscal
policy, they would have shipped them to the Virginian plantations,
where Turkish galleys did not venture, and they would not have
kidnapped men of seventy. Moreover, kidnappers would not damage their
captives by stabbing them in the side and thigh, when no resistance
was made, as was done to Harrison.

'The rest who were in the same condition' were 'dumped down' near
Smyrna, where the valuable Harrison was sold to 'a grave physician.'
'This Turk he' was eighty-seven years of age, and 'preferred Crowland
in Lincolnshire before all other places in England.' No inquiries are
known to have been made about a Turkish medical man who once practised
at Crowland in Lincolnshire, though, if he ever did, he was likely to
be remembered in the district. This Turk he employed Harrison in the
still room, and as a hand in the cotton fields, where he once knocked
his slave down with his fist--pretty well for a Turk of eighty-seven!
He also gave Harrison (whom he usually employed in the chemical
department of his business) 'a silver bowl, double gilt, to drink in,
and named him Boll'--his way of pronouncing bowl--no doubt he had
acquired a Lincolnshire accent.

This Turk fell ill on a Thursday, and died on Saturday, when Harrison
tramped to the nearest port, bowl and all. Two men in a Hamburg ship
refused to give him a passage, but a third, for the price of his
silver-gilt bowl, let him come aboard. Harrison was landed, wit