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 to me; and what I was willing to sell, he bought of me; 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 Brazils.

I had not been long here, before I was recommended to the house of a good honest man, like himself, who had an ingeino as they call it, (that is, a plantation and a sugar-house.) I lived with him some time, and acquainted myself, by that means, with the manner of planting and making of sugar:  and seeing how well the planters lived, and how they got rich suddenly, I resolved, if I could get a licence to settle there, I would turn planter among them:  endeavouring, in the mean time, to find out some way to get my money, which I had left in London, remitted to me.  To this purpose, getting a kind of a letter of naturalization, I purchased as much land that was uncured as my money would reach, and formed a plan for my plantation and settlement; such a one as might be suitable to the stock which I proposed to myself to receive from England.

I had a neighbour, a Portuguese of Lisbon, but:  born of English parents, whose name was Wells, and in much such circumstances as I was.  I call him my neighbour, because his plantation lay next to mine, and we went on very sociably together.  My stock was but low, as well as his; and we rather planted for food than any thing else, for about two years.  However, we began to increase, and our land began to come into order; so that Ihe third year we planted some tobacco, and made each of us a large piece of ground ready for planting canes in the year to come:  but we both wanted help; and now I found, more than before, I had done wrong in parting with my boy Xury.

But, alas! for me to do wrong, that never did right, was no great wonder.  I had no remedy, but to go on:  I had got into an employment quite remote to my genius, and directly contrary to the life I delighted in, and for which I forsook my father’s house, and broke through all his good advice:  nay, I was coining into the very middle station, or upper degree of low life, which my father advised me to before; and which, if I resolved to go on with, I might as well have staid at home, and never have fatigued myself in the world, as I had done:  and I used often to say to myself, I could have done this as well in England, among my friends, as have gone five thousand miles off to do it among strangers and savages, in a wilderness, and at such a distance as never to hear from any part of the world that had the least knowledge of me.