and when he heard it was under consideration, he came tc me; Friend, says he, I make a request to thee not to put any of these poor wretches to torment. Why, William, said I, why not? You see they will not give any account of what is become of the white men. Nay, says William, do not say so; I suppose they have given thee a full account of every particular of it. How so? says I: pray what are we the wiser for all their jabbering? Nay, says William, that may be thy fault, for aught I know: thou wilt not punish the poor men because they cannot speak English; and perhaps they never heard a word of English before. Now, I may very well suppose, that they had given thee a large account of everything; for thou seest with what earnestness, and how long, some of them have talked to thee; and if thou canst not understand their language, nor they thine, how can they help that? At the best, thou doest but suppose that they have not told thee the whole truth of the story; and, on the contrary, I suppose they have; and how wilt thou decide the question, whether thou art right, or whether I am right? Besides, what can they say to thee, when thou askest them a question upon the torture, and at the same time they do not understand the question, and thou doest not know whether they say aye or no?

It is no compliment to my moderation, to say, I was convinced by these reasons; and yet we had all much ado to keep our second lieutenant from murdering some of them, to make them tell. What if they had told; he did not understand one word of it; but he would not be persuaded but that the negroes must needs understand him, when he asked them, whether the ship had any boat or no, like ours, and what was become of it.

But there was no remedy but to wait till we made these people understand English; and to adjourn the story till that time. The case was thus; where they were taken on board the ship, that we could never understand, because they never knew the English names which we give to those coasts, or what nation they were who belonged to the ship, because they knew not one tongue from another; but thus far the negro I examined, who was the same whose leg William had cured, told us-that they did not speak the same language we spoke, nor the same our Portuguese spoke; so that in all probability they must be French or Dutch.

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Then he told us, that the white men used them barba rcusly; that they beat them unmercifully; that one of the negro men had a wife, and two negro children, one a daughter, about sixteen years old; that a white man abused the negro man's wife, and afterwards his daughter, which, as he said, made all the negro men mad; and that the woman's husband was in a great rage; at which the white man was so provoked, that he threatened to kill him; but, in the night, the negro man being loose, got a great club, by which he made us understand he meant a handspike, and that when the same Frenchman (if it was a Frenchman) came among them again, he began again to abuse the negro man's wife; at which the negro, taking up the handspike, knocked his brains out at one blow; and then taking the key from him with which he usually unlocked the handcuffs which the negroes were fettered with, he set about a hundred of them at liberty, who, getting up upon the deck, by the same skuttle that the white man came down, and taking the man's cutlass who was killed, and laying hold of what came next them, they fell upon the men that were upon the deck, and killed them all, and afterwards those they found upon the forecastle; that the captain and his other men, who were in the cabin and the roundhouse, defended themselves with great courage, and shot out at the loopholes at them, by which he and several other men were wounded, and some killed; but that they broke into the roundhouse, after a long dispute, where they killed two of the white men, but owned that the two white men killed eleven of their men, before they could break in; and then the rest having got down the skuttle into the great cabin, wounded three more of them.

That, after this, the gunner of the ship having secured himself in the gun-room, one of his men hauled up the long boat close under the stern, and putting into her all the arms and ammunition they could come at, got all into the boat, and afterwards took in the captain, and those that were with him, out of the great cabin. When they were all thus embarked, they resolved to lay the ship abroad again, and try to recover it. That they boarded the ship in a desperate manner, and killed at first all that stood in their way; but the negroes being by this time all loose, and having gotten some arms, though they understood nothing of powder and

bullet, or guns, yet the men could never master them. However, they lay under the ship's bow, and got out all the men they had left in the cook-room, who had maintained themselves there, notwithstanding all the negroes could do, and with their small arms killed between thirty and forty of the negroes, but were at last forced to leave them.

They could give me no account whereabouts this waswhether near the coast of Africa or far off-or how long it was before the ship fell into our hands; only, in general, it was a great while ago, as they called it; and, by all we could learn, it was within two or three days after they had set sail from the coast. They told us that they had killed about thirty of the white men, having knocked them on the head with crows and handspikes, and such things as they could get and one strong negro killed three of them with an iron crow, after he was shot twice through the body; and that he was afterwards shot through the head by the captain himself, at the door of the roundhouse, which he had split open with the crow; and this we suppose was the occasion of the great quantity of blood which we saw at the roundhouse door.

:

The same negro told us that they threw all the powder and shot they could find into the sea, and they would have thrown the great guns into the sea, if they could have lifted them. Being asked how they came to have their sails in such a condition, his answer was, They no understand; they no know what the sails do; that was, they did not so much as know that it was the sails that made the ship go, or understand what they meant, or what to do with them. When we asked him whither they were going, he said they did not know, but believed they should go home to their own country again. I asked him, in particular, what he thought we were, when we came first up with them: he said they were terribly frightened, believing we were the same white men that had gone away in their boats, and were come again in a great ship, with the two boats with them, and expected they would kill them all.

This was the account we got out of them, after we had taught them to speak English, and to understand the names and use of the things belonging to the ship, which they had occasion to speak of; and we observed that the fellows were too innocent to dissemble in their relation, and that they all

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agreed in the particulars, and were always in the same story, which confirmed very much the truth of what they said.

CHAPTER XII.

WILLIAM MAKES A TRADING VOYAGE WITH THE NEGROES, AND SELLS THEM ALL ADVANTAGEOUSLY-WE ARE JOINED OFF THE CAPE OF GOOD HOPE BY AN ENGLISH LONGBOAT FULL OF MEN-ACCOUNT OF THEM-VARIOUS CAPTURES MADE.

HAVING taken this ship, our next difficulty was, what to do with the negroes. The Portuguese in the Brazils would have bought them all of us, and been glad of the purchase, if we had not showed ourselves enemies there, and been known for pirates; but, as it was, we durst not go ashore anywhere thereabouts, or treat with any of the planters, because we should raise the whole country upon us; and, it there were any such things as men-of-war in any of their ports, we should be assured to be attacked by them, and by all the force they had by land or sea.

Nor could we think of any better success, if we went northward to our own plantations. One while we determined to carry them all away to Buenos Ayres, and sell them there to the Spaniards; but they were really too many for them to make use of; and to carry them round to the South Seas, which was the only remedy that was left, was so far that we should be no way able to subsist them for so long a voyage.

At last, our old never-failing friend, William, helped us out again, as he had often done at a dead-lift. His proposal was this, that he should go as master of the ship, and about twenty men, such as we could best trust, and attempt to trade privately, upon the coast of Brazil, with the planters, not at the principal ports, because that would not be admitted.

We all agreed to this, and appointed to go away ourselves towards the Rio de la Plata, where we had thought of going before, and to wait for him, not there, but at Port St. Pedro, as the Spaniards call it, lying at the mouth of the river which they call Rio Grande, and where the Spaniards

had a small fort and a few people, but we believe there was nobody in it.

Here we took up our station, cruising off and on, to see if we could meet any ships going to, or coming from, Buenos Ayres, or the Rio de la Plata; but we met with nothing worth notice. However, we employed ourselves in things necessary for our going off to sea; for we filled all our water-casks, and got some fish for our present use, to spare as much as possible our ship's stores.

William, in the meantime, went away to the north, and made the land about the Cape of St. Thomas; and, betwixt that and the isles of Tuberon, he found means to trade with the planters for all his negroes, as well the women as the men, and at a very good price too; for Willlam, who spoke Portuguese pretty well, told them a fair story enough, that the ship was in scarcity of provisions, that they were driven a great way out of their way, and indeed, as we say, out of their knowledge, and that they must go up to the northward as far as Jamaica, or sell there upon the coast. This was a very plausible tale, and was easily believed; and, if you observe the manner of the negroes' sailing, and what happened in their voyage, was every word of it true.

By this method, and being true to one another, William past for what he was; I mean for a very honest fellow, and, by the assistance of one planter, who sent to some of his neigbour planters, and managed the trade among themselves, he got a quick market; for in less than five weeks William sold all his negroes, and at last sold the ship itself, and shipped himself and his twenty men, with two negro boys whom he had left, in a sloop, one of those which the planters used to send on board for the negroes. With this sloop, Captain William, as we then called him, came away, and found us at Port St. Pedro, in the latitude of 32 degrees 30 minutes south.

Nothing was more surprising to us, than to see a sloop come along the coast, carrying Portuguese colours, and come in directly to us, after we were assured he had discovered both our ships. We fired a gun, upon her nearer approach, to bring her to an anchor, but immediately she fired five guns by way of salute, and spread her English ancient: then we began to guess it was friend William, but wondered what was the meaning of his being in a sloop, whereas we