Having learned so much of his miserable fate, and being now able to make shift to walk (though with weak and stumbling steps), our young gentleman lost no time in seeking the Captain, to whom he endeavored to explain the several accidents that had befallen him, acknowledging that he was the second son of the Earl of Clandennie, and declaring that if he, the Captain, would put the Prophet Daniel back into some English port again, his lordship would make it well worth his while to lose so much time for the sake of one so dear as a second son.  To this address the Captain, supposing him either to be drunk or disordered in his mind, made no other reply than to knock him incontinently down upon the deck, bidding him return forward where he belonged.

Thereafter poor Dunburne found himself enjoying the reputation of a harmless madman.  The name of the Earl of Rags was bestowed upon him, and the miserable companions of his wretched plight were never tired of tempting him to recount his adventures, for the sake of entertaining themselves by teasing that which they supposed to be his hapless mania.

Nor is it easy to conceive of all the torments that those miserable, obscene wretches were able to inflict upon him.  Under the teasing sting of his companions’ malevolent pleasantries, there were times when Dunburne might, as he confessed to himself, have committed a murder with the greatest satisfaction in the world.  However, he was endowed with no small command of self-restraint, so that he was still able to curb his passions within the bounds of reason and of policy.  He was, fortunately, a complete master of the French and Italian languages, so that when the fury of his irritation would become too excessive for him to control, he would ease his spirits by castigating his tormentors with a consuming verbosity in those foreign tongues, which, had his companions understood a single word of that which he uttered, would have earned for him a beating that would have landed him within an inch of his life.  However, they attributed all that he said to the irrational gibbering of a maniac.

About midway of their voyage the Prophet Daniel encountered a tremendous storm, which drove her so far out of the Captain’s reckoning that when land was sighted, in the afternoon of a tempestuous day in the latter part of August, the first mate, who had been for some years in the New England trade, opined that it was the coast of Rhode Island, and that if the Captain chose to do so he might run into New Hope Harbor and lie there until the southeaster had blown itself out.  This advice the Captain immediately put into execution, so that by nightfall they had dropped anchor in the comparative quiet of that excellent harbor.