so positively determined against what they knew my
inclinations prompted me to. But being one day at Hull, where I went
casually, and without any purpose of making an elopement that time; but
I say, being there, and one of my companions being going by sea to
London, in his father's ship, and prompting me to go with them, with the
common allurement of seafaring men, viz. that it should cost me nothing
for my passage, I consulted neither father or mother any more, not so
much as sent them word of it; but leaving them to hear of it as they
might, without asking God's blessing, or my father's, without any
consideration of circumstances or consequences, and in an ill hour, God
knows, on the first of September, 1651, I went on board a ship bound for
London. Never any young adventurer's misfortunes, I believe, began
sooner, or continued longer than mine. The ship was no sooner gotten out
of the Humber, but the wind began to blow, and the waves to rise in a
most frightful manner; and, as I had never been at sea before, I was
most inexpressibly sick in body, and terrified in mind. I began now
seriously to reflect upon what I had done, and how justly I was
overtaken by the judgment of Heaven for my wicked leaving my father's
house, and abandoning my duty; all the good counsel of my parents, my
father's tears and my mother's entreaties, came now fresh into my mind;
and my conscience, which was not yet come to the pitch of hardness to
which it has been since, reproached me with the contempt of advice, and
the breach of my duty to God and my father.

All this while the storm increased, and the sea, which I had never been
upon before, went very high, though nothing like what I have seen many
times since; no, nor like what I saw a few days after: but it was enough
to affect me then, who was but a young sailor, and had never known any
thing of the matter. I expected every wave would have swallowed us up,
and that every time the ship fell down, as I thought, in the trough or
hollow of the sea, we should never rise more; and in this agony of mind
I made many vows and resolutions, that if it would please God here to
spare my life this one voyage, if ever I got once my foot upon dry land
again I would go directly home to my father, and never set it into a
ship again while I lived; that I would take his advice, and never run
myself into such miseries as these any more. Now I saw plainly the
goodness of his observations about the middle stat