what you
have, you will be starved there, and then I only take away that life I
have given. No, no, Seignor Inglese," says he, "Mr. Englishman, I will
carry you thither in charity, and those things will help you to buy your
subsistence there, and your passage home again."
As he was charitable in his proposal, so he was just in the performance
to a tittle; for he ordered the seamen, that none should offer to touch
any thing I had: then he took every thing into his own possession, and
gave me back an exact inventory of them, that I might have them; even so
much as my three earthen jars.
As to my boat, it was a very good one, and that he saw, and told me he
would buy it of me for the ship's use, and asked me what I would have
for it? I told him, he had been so generous to me in everything, that I
could not offer to make any price of the boat, but left it entirely to
him; upon which he told me he would give me a note of his hand to pay me
eighty pieces of eight for it at Brasil; and when it came there, if any
one offered to give more, he would make it up: he offered me also sixty
pieces of eight more for my boy Xury, which I was loath to lake; not
that I was not willing to let the captain have him, but I was very loath
to sell the poor boy's liberty, who had assisted me so faithfully in
procuring my own. However, when I let him know my reason, he owned it to
be just, and offered me this medium, that he would give the boy an
obligation to set him free in ten years, if he turned Christian. Upon
this, and Xury saying he was willing to go to him, I let the
captain have him.
We had a very good voyage to the Brasils, and arrived in the Bay de
Todos los Santos, or All Saints' Bay, in about twenty-two days after.
And now I was once more delivered from the most miserable of all
conditions of life; and what to do next with myself I was now
to consider.
The generous treatment the captain gave me, I can never enough remember;
he would take nothing of me for my passage, gave me twenty ducats for
the leopard's skin, and forty for the lion's skin which I had in my
boat, and caused every thing I had in the ship to be punctually
delivered me; and what I was willing to sell he bought, such as the case
of bottles, two of my guns, and a piece of the lump of bees-wax, for I
had made candles of the rest; in a word, I made about two hundred and
twenty pieces of eight of all my cargo; and with this stock I went on
shore in the Brasils.
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