I asked him then how it came to pass that those people who had so shut themselves up in the ships had not laid in sufficient stores of all things necessary.  He said some of them had; but, on the other hand, some did not come on board till they were frightened into it, and till it was too dangerous for them to go to the proper people to lay in quantities of things; and that he waited on two ships, which he showed me, that had laid in little or nothing but biscuit bread[172] and ship beer, and that he had bought everything else almost for them.  I asked him if there were any more ships that had separated themselves as those had done.  He told me yes; all the way up from the point, right against Greenwich, to within the shores of Limehouse and Redriff, all the ships that could have room rid[173] two and two in the middle of the stream, and that some of them had several families on board.  I asked him if the distemper had not reached them.  He said he believed it had not, except two or three ships, whose people had not been so watchful as to keep the seamen from going on shore as others had been; and he said it was a very fine sight to see how the ships lay up the Pool.[174]

When he said he was going over to Greenwich as soon as the tide began to come in, I asked if he would let me go with him, and bring me back, for that I had a great mind to see how the ships were ranged, as he had told me.  He told me if I would assure him, on the word of a Christian and of an honest man, that I had not the distemper, he would.  I assured him that I had not; that it had pleased God to preserve me; that I lived in Whitechapel, but was too impatient of being so long within doors, and that I had ventured out so far for the refreshment of a little air, but that none in my house had so much as been touched with it.

“Well, sir,” says he, “as your charity has been moved to pity me and my poor family, sure you cannot have so little pity left as to put yourself into my boat if you were not sound in health, which would be nothing less than killing me, and ruining my whole family.”  The poor man troubled me so much when he spoke of his family with such a sensible concern and in such an affectionate manner, that I could not satisfy myself at first to go at all.  I told him I would lay aside my curiosity rather than make him uneasy, though I was sure, and very thankful for it, that I had no more distemper upon me than the freshest man in the world.  Well, he would not have me put it off neither, but, to let me see how confident he was that I was just to him, he now importuned me to go:  so, when the tide came up to his boat, I went in, and he carried me to Greenwich.  While he bought the things which he had in charge to buy, I walked up to the top of the hill, under which the town stands, and on the east side of the town, to get a prospect of the river; but it was a surprising sight to see the number of ships which lay in rows, two and two, and in some places two or three such lines in the breadth of the river, and this not only up to the town, between the houses which we call Ratcliff and Redriff, which they name the Pool, but even down the whole river, as far as the head of Long Reach, which is as far as the hills give us leave to see it.