confessing his willingness for evil courses as readily as his
     later repentance, is no less striking a personality.  By sheer
     imagination the genius of Defoe makes Singleton’s adventures,
     including the impossible journey across Central Africa, real
     and credible.  The book is a model of fine narrative.

I.—­Sailing With the Devil

If I may believe the woman whom I was taught to call mother, I was a little boy about two years old, very well dressed, and had a nurse-maid to attend me, who took me out on a fine summer’s evening into the fields towards Islington, to give the child some air; a little girl being with her, of twelve or fourteen years old, that lived in the neighbourhood.

The maid meets with a fellow, her sweetheart; he carries her into a public-house, and while they are toying in there the girl plays about with me in her hand, sometimes in sight, sometimes out of sight, thinking no harm.

Then comes by one of those sort of people who make it their business to spirit away little children, a trade chiefly practised where they found little children well dressed, and for bigger children, to sell them to the plantations.

The woman, pretending to take me up in her arms and play with me, draws the girl a good way from the house, and then bids her go back to the maid, and tell her that a gentlewoman had taken a fancy to the child.  And so, while the girl went, she carries me quite away.

From that time, it seems, I was disposed of to a beggar woman, and after that to a gipsy, till I was about six years old.

And this gipsy, though I was continually dragged about with her from one part of the country to the other, never let me want for anything.  I called her mother, but she told me at last she was not my mother, but that she bought me for twelve shillings, and that my name was Bob Singleton, not Robert, but plain Bob.

Who my father and mother really were I have never learnt.

When my gipsy mother happened in process of time to be hanged, I was sent to a parish school; and then I was moved from one parish to another, and at Bussleton, near Southampton, the master of a ship took a fancy to me, and though I was not above twelve years old, he carried me to sea with him on a voyage to Newfoundland.

I went several voyages with him, when, coming home from Newfoundland about the year 1695, we were taken by an Algerine rover, which was in its turn taken by two great Portuguese men-of-war.

We were carried into Lisbon, and there my master, the only friend I had in the world, dying of his wounds, I was left starving in a foreign country where I knew nobody, and could not speak a word of the language.

However, an old pilot found me, and, speaking in broken English, asked me if I would go with him.

“Yes,” said I, “with all my heart.”

For two years I lived with him, and then he got to be master under Don Garcia de Carravallas, captain of a Portuguese galleon, which was bound to Goa in the East Indies.  On this voyage I began to get a smattering of the Portuguese tongue and a superficial knowledge of navigation.  I also learnt to be an arrant thief and a bad sailor.