more. I, catching up the babe from her breast,
tried to run: but when I saw the town full of
them, and their dogs with them in leashes, which was
yet worse, I knew all was lost, and sat down again
by the corpse with the babe on my knees, waiting the
end, like one stunned and in a dream; for now I thought
God from whom I had fled had surely found me out, as
He did Jonah, and the punishment of all my sins was
come. Well, gentlemen, they dragged me out, and
all the young men and women, and chained us together
by the neck; and one, catching the pretty babe out
of my arms, calls for water and a priest (for they
had their shavelings with them), and no sooner was
it christened than, catching the babe by the heels,
he dashed out its brains,—oh! gentlemen,
gentlemen!—against the ground, as if it
had been a kitten; and so did they to several more
innocents that night, after they had christened them;
saying it was best for them to go to heaven while
they were still sure thereof; and so marched us all
for slaves, leaving the old folk and the wounded to
die at leisure. But when morning came, and they
knew by my skin that I was no Indian, and by my speech
that I was no Spaniard, they began threatening me with
torments, till I confessed that I was an Englishman,
and one of Oxenham’s crew. At that says
the leader, ’Then you shall to Lima, to hang
by the side of your captain the pirate;’ by
which I first knew that my poor captain was certainly
gone; but alas for me! the priest steps in and claims
me for his booty, calling me Lutheran, heretic, and
enemy of God; and so, to make short a sad story, to
the Inquisition at Cartagena I went, where what I
suffered, gentlemen, were as disgustful for you to
hear, as unmanly for me to complain of; but so it
was, that being twice racked, and having endured the
water-torment as best I could, I was put to the scarpines,
whereof I am, as you see, somewhat lame of one leg
to this day. At which I could abide no more,
and so, wretch that I am! denied my God, in hope to
save my life; which indeed I did, but little it profited
me; for though I had turned to their superstition,
I must have two hundred stripes in the public place,
and then go to the galleys for seven years. And
there, gentlemen, ofttimes I thought that it had been
better for me to have been burned at once and for all:
but you know as well as I what a floating hell of
heat and cold, hunger and thirst, stripes and toil,
is every one of those accursed craft. In which
hell, nevertheless, gentlemen, I found the road to
heaven,—I had almost said heaven itself.
For it fell out, by God’s mercy, that my next
comrade was an Englishman like myself, a young man
of Bristol, who, as he told me, had been some manner
of factor on board poor Captain Barker’s ship,
and had been a preacher among the Anabaptists here
in England. And, oh! Sir Richard Grenville,
if that man had done for you what he did for me, you
would never say a word against those who serve the
same Lord, because they don’t altogether hold