lf in
the most lively colours, how I must have acted, if I had got nothing out
of the ship; how I could not have so much as got any food, except fish
and turtles; and that, as it was long before I found any of them, I must
have perished first: that I should have lived, if I had not perished,
like a mere savage: that if I had killed a goat or a fowl by any
contrivance, I had no way to flay or open them, or part the flesh from
the skin and the bowels, or to cut it up; but must gnaw it with my
teeth, and pull it with my claws, like a beast.

These reflections made me very sensible of the goodness of Providence to
me, and very thankful for my present condition, with all its hardships
and misfortunes: and this part also I cannot but recommend to the
reflection of those who are apt in their misery to say, Is any
affliction like mine? Let them consider, how much worse the cases of
some people are, and what their case might have been, if Providence had
thought fit.

I had another reflection which assisted me also to comfort my mind with
hopes; and this was, comparing my present condition with what I had
deserved, and had therefore reason to expect from the hand of
Providence. I had lived a dreadful life, perfectly destitute of the
knowledge and fear of God: I had been well instructed by father and
mother; neither had they been wanting to me in their early endeavours to
infuse a religious awe of God into my mind, a sense of my duty, and of
what the nature and end of my being required of me. But, alas! falling
early into the seafaring life, which of all the lives is the most
destitute of the fear of God, though his terrors are always before them;
I say, falling early into the seafaring life, and into seafaring
company, all that little sense of religion which I had entertained, was
laughed out of me by my messmates; by an hardened despising of dangers,
and the views of death, which grew habitual to me; by my long absence
from all manner of opportunities to converse with any thing but what was
like myself, or to hear any thing of what was good, or tended
towards it.

So void was I of every thing that was good, or of the least sense of
what I was, or was to be, that in the greatest deliverance I enjoyed,
such as my escape from Sallee, my being taken up by the Portuguese
master of the ship, my being planted so well in Brasil, my receiving the
cargo from England, and the like, I never once had the words, Thank God,
so much as on m