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give him leave, with four or five negroes, to go out for six or seven days, to seek his fortune, and see what he could discover in the country, assuring us, whatever he got should be for the public stock. We all gave him our consent, and lent him a gun; and two of our men desiring to go with him, they took then six negroes with them, and two of our buffaloes that came with us the whole journey; they took about eight days' provision of bread with them, but no flesh, except about as much dried flesh as would serve them two days.

They travelled up to the top of the mountains I mentioned just now, where they saw (as our men afterwards vouched it to be) the same desert which we were so justly terrified at, when we were on the further side, and which, by our calculation, could not be less than three hundred miles broad, and above six hundred miles in length, without knowing where it ended.

The journal of their travels is too long to enter upon here; they stayed out two and fifty days, when they brought us seventeen pounds, and something more (for we had no exact weight), of gold dust, some of it in much larger pieces than any we found before; besides about fifteen ton of elephants' teeth, which he had, partly by good usage, and partly by bad, obliged the savages of the country to fetch, and bring down to him from the mountains, and which he made others bring with him quite down to our camp. Indeed we wondered what was coming to us, when we saw him attended with above two hundred negroes; but he soon undeceived us, when he made them all throw down their burthens on a heap, at the entrance of our camp.

Besides this, they brought lions' skins, and five leopards' skins, very large and very fine. He asked our pardon for his long stay, and that he had made no greater a booty, but told us, he had one excursion more to make, which he hoped should turn to a better account.

So, having rested himself, and rewarded the savages that brought the teeth for him, with some bits of silver and iron cut out diamond-fashion, and with two shaped like little dogs, he sent them away mightily pleased.

The second journey he went, some more of our men desired to go with him, and they made a troop of ten white men, and ten savages, and the two buffaloes to carry their

provisions and ammunition. They took the same course, only not exactly the same track, and they stayed thirty-two days only, in which time they killed no less than fifteen leopards, three lions, and several other creatures, and brought us home four and twenty pounds some ounces of gold dust, and only six elephants' teeth, but they were very great ones.

Our friend the Englishman showed us now, that our time was well bestowed; for in five months, which we had stayed here, we had gathered so much gold dust, that, when we came to share it, we had five pounds and a quarter to a man, besides what we had before, and besides six or seven pounds' weight which we had at several times given to our artificer to make baubles with; and now we talked of going forward to the coast, to put an end to our journey; but our guide laughed at us then: nay, you cannot go now, says he, for the rainy season begins next month, and there will be no stirring then. This we found indeed reasonable, so we resolved to furnish ourselves with provisions, that we might not be obliged to go abroad too much in the rain, and we spread ourselves, some one way, and some another, as far as we cared to venture, to get provisions, and our negroes killed us some deer, which we cured, as well as we could, in the sun, for we had no salt.

By this time the rainy months were set in, and we could scarce, for above two months, look out of our huts. But that was not all, for the rivers were so swelled with the landfloods, that we scarce knew the little brooks and rivulets from the great navigable rivers. This had been a very good opportunity to have conveyed by water, upon rafts, our elephants' teeth, of which we had a very great pile; for, as we always gave the savages some reward for their labour, the very women would bring us teeth upon every opportunity, and sometimes a great tooth carried between two; so that our quantity was increased to about two and twenty tons of teeth.

As soon as the weather proved fair again, he told us he would not press us to any farther stay, since we did not care whether we got any more gold or not: that we were indeed the first men he ever met with in his life, that said they had gold enough, and of whom it might be truly said that, when it lay under our feet, we would not stoop to

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take it up. But since he had made us a promise, he would not break it, nor press us to make any farther stay, only he thought he ought to tell us, that now was the time, after the landflood, when the greatest quantity of gold was found; and that, if we stayed but one month, we should see thousands of savages spread themselves over the whole country, to wash the gold out of the sand, for the European ships which would come on the coast; that they do it then, because the rage of the floods always works down a great deal of gold out of the hills; and if we took the advantage to be there before them, we did not know what extraordinary things we might find.

This was so forcible, and so well argued, that it appeared in all our faces we were prevailed upon; so we told him we would all stay; for, though it was true we were all eager to be gone, yet the evident prospect of so much advantage could not be well resisted—that he was greatly mistaken when he suggested that we did not desire to increase our store of gold, and in that we were resolved to make the utmost use of the advantage that was in our hands, and would stay as long as any gold was to be had, if it was another year.

He could hardly express the joy he was in on this occasion; and the fair weather coming on, we began, just as he directed, to search about the rivers for more gold. At first we had but little encouragement, and began to be doubtful; but it was very plain that the reason was, the water was not fully fallen, or the rivers reduced to their usual channel. But in a few days we were fully requited, and found much more gold than at first, and in bigger lumps; and one of our men washed out of the sand a piece of gold as big as a small nut, which weighed, by our estimation, for we had no small weights, almost an ounce and a half.

This success made us extremely diligent, and in a little more than a month we had altogether gotten near sixty pounds' weight of gold; but after this, as he told us, we found abundance of the savages, men, women, and children, hunting every river and brook, and even the dry land of the hills, for gold, so that we could do nothing like then, compared to what we had done before.

But our artificer f and a way to make other people find

us in gold without our own labour; for, when these people began to appear, he had a considerable quantity of his toys, birds, beasts, &c., such as before, ready for them, and, the English gentleman being the interpreter, he brought the savages to admire them; so our cutler had trade enough, and, to be sure, sold his goods at a monstrous rate, for he would get an ounce of gold, sometimes two, for a bit of silver, perhaps of the value of a groat-nay, if it were iron -and if it were of gold, they would not give the more for it; and it was incredible almost to think what a quantity of gold he got that way.

In a word, to bring this happy journey to a conclusion, we increased our stock of gold here, in three months' stay more, to such a degree that, bringing it all to a common stock, in order to share it, we divided almost four pounds' weight again to every man; and then we set forward for the gold coast, to see what method we could find out for our passage into Europe.

There happened several very remarkable incidents in this part of our journey, as to how we were, or were not, received friendly by the several nations of savages through which we passed; how we delivered one negro king from captivity, who had been a benefactor to our new guide; and how our guide, in gratitude, by our assistance, restored him to his kingdom, which, perhaps, might contain about three hundred subjects; how he entertained us; and how he made his subjects go with our Englishman, and fetch all our elephants' teeth which we had been obliged to leave behind us, and to carry them for us to the river, the name of which I forgot, where we made rafts, and in eleven days more came down to one of the Dutch settlements on the gold coast, where we arrived in perfect health, and to our great satisfaction. As for our cargo of teeth, we sold it to the Dutch factory, and received clothes and other necessaries for ourselves, and such of our negroes as we thought fit to keep with us; and it is to be observed that we had four pounds of gunpowder left when we ended our journey. The negro prince we made perfectly free, clothed him out of our common stock, and gave him a pound and a half of gold for himself, which he knew very well how to manage; and here we all parted after the most friendly manner possible. Our Englishman remained in the Dutch factory ome time, and,

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as I heard afterwards, died there of grief; for he having sent a thousand pounds sterling over to England, by the way of Holland, for his refuge at his return to his friends, the ship was taken by the French, and the effects all lost.

The rest of my comrades went away, in a small bark, to the two Portuguese factories, near Gambia, in the latitude of 14 degrees; and I, with two negroes which I kept with me, went away to Cape Coast Castle, where I got passage for England, and arrived there in September; and thus ended my first harvest of wild oats; the rest were not sowed to so much advantage.

CHAPTER X.

I FALL INTO BAD COMPANY IN ENGLAND, AND SPEND MY MONEY-I SHIP MYSELF ON A VOYAGE TO CADIZ-THE COMPANY I MEET THERE-TURN PIRATE-ADVENTURESACCOUNT OF WILLIAM WALTERS, AND OF OUR EXPEDITIONS.

I HAD neither friend, relation, nor acquaintance in England, though it was my native country: I had consequently no person to trust with what I had, or to counsel me to secure or save it; but, falling into ill company, and trusting the keeper of a public-house in Rotherhithe with a great part of my money, and hastily squandering away the rest, all that great sum, which I got with so much pains and hazard, was gone in little more than two years' time; and, as I even rage in my own thoughts to reflect upon the manner how it was wasted, so I need record no more: the rest merits to be concealed with blushes, for that it was spent in all kinds of folly and wickedness; so this scene of my life may be said to have begun in theft and ended in luxury; a sad setting-out, and a worse coming home.

About the year 1686, I began to see the bottom of my stock, and that it was time to think of farther adventures; for my spoilers, as I call them, began to let me know, that as my money declined, their respect would ebb with it, and that I had nothing to expect of them farther than as I might command it by the force of my money, which, in short, would not go an inch the farther for all that had been spent in their favour before.