The Journal of a Voyage to Lisbon

INTRODUCTION TO SEVERAL WORKS

When it was determined to extend the present edition of Fielding, not

merely by the addition of Jonathan Wild to the three universally popular

novels, but by two volumes of Miscellanies, there could be no doubt

about at least one of the contents of these latter. The Journal of a

Voyage to Lisbon, if it does not rank in my estimation anywhere near to

Jonathan Wild as an example of our author's genius, is an invaluable and

delightful document for his character and memory. It is indeed, as has

been pointed out in the General Introduction to this series, our main

source of indisputable information as to Fielding dans son naturel, and

its value, so far as it goes, is of the very highest. The gentle and

unaffected stoicism which the author displays under a disease which he

knew well was probably, if not certainly, mortal, and which, whether

mortal or not, must cause him much actual pain and discomfort of a kind

more intolerable than pain itself; his affectionate care for his family;

even little personal touches, less admirable, but hardly less pleasant

than these, showing an Englishman's dislike to be "done" and an

Englishman's determination to be treated with proper respect, are

scarcely less noticeable and important on the biographical side than the

unimpaired brilliancy of his satiric and yet kindly observation of life

and character is on the side of literature.

There is, as is now well known since Mr. Dobson's separate edition of

the Voyage, a little bibliographical problem about the first appearance

of this Journal in 1755. The best known issue of that year is much

shorter than the version inserted by Murphy and reprinted here, the

passages omitted being chiefly those reflecting on the captain, etc.,

and so likely to seem invidious in a book published just after the

author's death, and for the benefit, as was expressly announced, of his

family. But the curious thing is that there is ANOTHER edition, of date

so early that some argument is necessary to determine the priority,

which does give these passages and is identical with the later or

standard version. For satisfaction on this point, however, I must refer

readers to Mr. Dobson himself.

There might have been a little, but not much, doubt as to a companion

piece for the Journal; for indeed, after we close this (with or without

its "Fragment on Bolingbroke"), the remainder of Fielding's work lies

on a distinctly lower level of interest. It is still interesting, or

it would not be given here. It still has--at least that part which here

appears seems to its editor to have--interest intrinsic and "simple of

itself." But it is impossible for anybody who speaks critically to deny

that we now get into the region where work is more interesting because

of its authorship than it would be if its authorship were different

or unknown. To put the same thing in a sharper antithesis, Fielding is

interesting, first of all, because he is the author of Joseph Andrews,

of Tom Jones, of Amelia, of Jonathan Wild, of the Journal. His plays,

his essays, his miscellanies generally are interesting, first of all,

because they were written by Fielding.

Yet of these works, the Journey from this World to the Next (which, by

a grim trick of fortune, might have served as a title for the more

interesting Voyage with which we have yoked it) stands clearly first

both in scale and merit. It is indeed very unequal, and as the author

was to leave it unfinished, it is a pity that he did not leave it

unfinished much sooner than he actually did. The first ten chapters, if

of a kind of satire which has now grown rather obsolete for the

nonce, are of a good kind and good in their kind; the history of the

metempsychoses of Julian is of a less good kind, and less good in that

kind. The date of composition of the piece is not known, but it appeared

in the Miscellanies of 1743, and may represent almost any period of its

author's development prior to that year. Its form was a very common form

at the time, and continued to be so. I do not know that it is necessary

to assign any very special origin to it, though Lucian, its chief

practitioner, was evidently and almost avowedly a favorite study of

Fielding's. The Spanish romancers, whether borrowing it from Lucian or

not, had been fond of it; their French followers, of whom the chief were

Fontenelle and Le Sage, had carried it northwards; the English essayists

had almost from the beginning continued the process of acclimatization.

Fielding therefore found it ready to his hand, though the present

condition of this example would lead us to suppose that he did not find

his hand quite ready to it. Still, in the actual "journey," there are

touches enough of the master--not yet quite in his stage of mastery.

It seemed particularly desirable not to close the series without some

representation of the work to which Fielding gave the prime of his

manhood, and from which, had he not, fortunately for English literature,

been driven decidedly against his will, we had had in all probability no

Joseph Andrews, and pretty certainly no Tom Jones. Fielding's periodical

and dramatic work has been comparatively seldom reprinted, and has

never yet been reprinted as a whole. The dramas indeed are open to two

objections--the first, that they are not very "proper;" the second, and

much more serious, that they do not redeem this want of propriety by the

possession of any remarkable literary merit. Three (or two and part of

a third) seemed to escape this double censure--the first two acts of the

Author's Farce (practically a piece to themselves, for the Puppet Show

which follows is almost entirely independent); the famous burlesque of

Tom Thumb, which stands between the Rehearsal and the Critic, but nearer

to the former; and Pasquin, the maturest example of Fielding's satiric

work in drama. These accordingly have been selected; the rest I have

read, and he who likes may read. I have read many worse things than even

the worst of them, but not often worse things by so good a writer as

Henry Fielding. The next question concerned the selection of writings

more miscellaneous still, so as to give in little a complete idea of

Fielding's various powers and experiments. Two difficulties beset this

part of the task--want of space and the absence of anything so markedly

good as absolutely to insist on inclusion. The Essay on Conversation,

however, seemed pretty peremptorily to challenge a place. It is in a

style which Fielding was very slow to abandon, which indeed has left

strong traces even on his great novels; and if its mannerism is not

now very attractive, the separate traits in it are often sharp and

well-drawn. The book would not have been complete without a specimen or

two of Fielding's journalism. The Champion, his first attempt of this

kind, has not been drawn upon in consequence of the extreme difficulty

of fixing with absolute certainty on Fielding's part in it. I do not

know whether political prejudice interferes, more than I have usually

found it interfere, with my judgment of the two Hanoverian-partisan

papers of the '45 time. But they certainly seem to me to fail in

redeeming their dose of rancor and misrepresentation by any sufficient

evidence of genius such as, to my taste, saves not only the party

journalism in verse and prose of Swift and Canning and Praed on one

side, but that of Wolcot and Moore and Sydney Smith on the other. Even

the often-quoted journal of events in London under the Chevalier is

overwrought and tedious. The best thing in the True Patriot seems to me

to be Parson Adams' letter describing his adventure with a young "bowe"

of his day; and this I select, together with one or two numbers of the

Covent Garden Journal. I have not found in this latter anything more

characteristic than Murphy's selection, though Mr. Dobson, with his

unfailing kindness, lent me an original and unusually complete set of

the Journal itself.

It is to the same kindness that I owe the opportunity of presenting the

reader with something indisputably Fielding's and very characteristic

of him, which Murphy did not print, and which has not, so far as I know,

ever appeared either in a collection or a selection of Fielding's work.

After the success of David Simple, Fielding gave his sister, for whom he

had already written a preface to that novel, another preface for a set

of Familiar Letters between the characters of David Simple and others.

This preface Murphy reprinted; but he either did not notice, or did

not choose to attend to, a note towards the end of the book attributing

certain of the letters to the author of the preface, the attribution

being accompanied by an agreeably warm and sisterly denunciation of

those who ascribed to Fielding matter unworthy of him. From these the

letter which I have chosen, describing a row on the Thames, seems to

me not only characteristic, but, like all this miscellaneous work,

interesting no less for its weakness than for its strength. In hardly

any other instance known to me can we trace so clearly the influence of

a suitable medium and form on the genius of the artist. There are some

writers--Dryden is perhaps the greatest of them--to whom form and medium

seem almost indifferent, their all-round craftsmanship being such that

they can turn any kind and every style to their purpose. There are

others, of whom I think our present author is the chief, who are

never really at home but in one kind. In Fielding's case that kind was

narrative of a peculiar sort, half-sentimental, half-satirical, and

almost wholly sympathetic--narrative which has the singular gift of

portraying the liveliest character and yet of admitting the widest

disgression and soliloquy.

Until comparatively late in his too short life, when he found this

special path of his (and it is impossible to say whether the actual

finding was in the case of Jonathan or in the case of Joseph), he did

but flounder and slip. When he had found it, and was content to walk

in it, he strode with as sure and steady a step as any other, even the

greatest, of those who carry and hand on the torch of literature through

the ages. But it is impossible to derive full satisfaction from his

feats in this part of the race without some notion of his performances

elsewhere; and I believe that such a notion will be supplied to the

readers of his novels by the following volumes, in a very large number

of cases, for the first time.

THE JOURNAL OF A VOYAGE TO LISBON

DEDICATION TO THE PUBLIC

Your candor is desired on the perusal of the following sheets, as

they are the product of a genius that has long been your delight and

entertainment. It must be acknowledged that a lamp almost burnt out does

not give so steady and uniform a light as when it blazes in its full

vigor; but yet it is well known that by its wavering, as if struggling

against its own dissolution, it sometimes darts a ray as bright as ever.

In like manner, a strong and lively genius will, in its last struggles,

sometimes mount aloft, and throw forth the most striking marks of its

original luster.

Wherever these are to be found, do you, the genuine patrons of

extraordinary capacities, be as liberal in your applauses of him who is

now no more as you were of him whilst he was yet amongst you. And, on

the other hand, if in this little work there should appear any traces of

a weakened and decayed life, let your own imaginations place before your

eyes a true picture in that of a hand trembling in almost its

latest hour, of a body emaciated with pains, yet struggling for your

entertainment; and let this affecting picture open each tender heart,

and call forth a melting tear, to blot out whatever failings may be

found in a work begun in pain, and finished almost at the same period

with life. It was thought proper by the friends of the deceased that

this little piece should come into your hands as it came from the hands

of the author, it being judged that you would be better pleased to have

an opportunity of observing the faintest traces of a genius you have

long admired, than have it patched by a different hand, by which means

the marks of its true author might have been effaced. That the success

of the last written, though first published, volume of the author's

posthumous pieces may be attended with some convenience to those

innocents he hath left behind, will no doubt be a motive to encourage

its circulation through the kingdom, which will engage every future

genius to exert itself for your pleasure. The principles and spirit

which breathe in every line of the small fragment begun in answer to

Lord Bolingbroke will unquestionably be a sufficient apology for its

publication, although vital strength was wanting to finish a work so

happily begun and so well designed. PREFACE THERE would not, perhaps,

be a more pleasant or profitable study, among those which have their

principal end in amusement, than that of travels or voyages, if they

were wrote as they might be and ought to be, with a joint view to

the entertainment and information of mankind. If the conversation of

travelers be so eagerly sought after as it is, we may believe their

books will be still more agreeable company, as they will in general be

more instructive and more entertaining. But when I say the conversation

of travelers is usually so welcome, I must be understood to mean that

only of such as have had good sense enough to apply their peregrinations

to a proper use, so as to acquire from them a real and valuable

knowledge of men and things, both which are best known by comparison. If

the customs and manners of men were everywhere the same, there would be

no office so dull as that of a traveler, for the difference of hills,

valleys, rivers, in short, the various views of which we may see the

face of the earth, would scarce afford him a pleasure worthy of

his labor; and surely it would give him very little opportunity of

communicating any kind of entertainment or improvement to others.

To make a traveler an agreeable companion to a man of sense, it is

necessary, not only that he should have seen much, but that he should

have overlooked much of what he hath seen. Nature is not, any more than

a great genius, always admirable in her productions, and therefore the

traveler, who may be called her commentator, should not expect to find

everywhere subjects worthy of his notice. It is certain, indeed, that

one may be guilty of omission, as well as of the opposite extreme; but

a fault on that side will be more easily pardoned, as it is better to

be hungry than surfeited; and to miss your dessert at the table of a man

whose gardens abound with the choicest fruits, than to have your

taste affronted with every sort of trash that can be picked up at the

green-stall or the wheel-barrow. If we should carry on the analogy

between the traveler and the commentator, it is impossible to keep one's

eye a moment off from the laborious much-read doctor Zachary Gray, of

whose redundant notes on Hudibras I shall only say that it is, I am

confident, the single book extant in which above five hundred authors

are quoted, not one of which could be found in the collection of the

late doctor Mead.

As there are few things which a traveler is to record, there are fewer

on which he is to offer his observations: this is the office of the

reader; and it is so pleasant a one, that he seldom chooses to have

it taken from him, under the pretense of lending him assistance. Some

occasions, indeed, there are, when proper observations are pertinent,

and others when they are necessary; but good sense alone must point them

out. I shall lay down only one general rule; which I believe to be of

universal truth between relator and hearer, as it is between author and

reader; this is, that the latter never forgive any observation of the

former which doth not convey some knowledge that they are sensible they

could not possibly have attained of themselves.

But all his pains in collecting knowledge, all his judgment in

selecting, and all his art in communicating it, will not suffice,

unless he can make himself, in some degree, an agreeable as well as an

instructive companion. The highest instruction we can derive from the

tedious tale of a dull fellow scarce ever pays us for our attention.

There is nothing, I think, half so valuable as knowledge, and yet there

is nothing which men will give themselves so little trouble to attain;

unless it be, perhaps, that lowest degree of it which is the object

of curiosity, and which hath therefore that active passion constantly

employed in its service. This, indeed, it is in the power of every

traveler to gratify; but it is the leading principle in weak minds only.

To render his relation agreeable to the man of sense, it is therefore

necessary that the voyager should possess several eminent and rare

talents; so rare indeed, that it is almost wonderful to see them ever

united in the same person. And if all these talents must concur in the

relator, they are certainly in a more eminent degree necessary to the

writer; for here the narration admits of higher ornaments of style,

and every fact and sentiment offers itself to the fullest and most

deliberate examination. It would appear, therefore, I think, somewhat

strange if such writers as these should be found extremely common; since

nature hath been a most parsimonious distributor of her richest talents,

and hath seldom bestowed many on the same person. But, on the other

hand, why there should scarce exist a single writer of this kind worthy

our regard; and, whilst there is no other branch of history (for this

is history) which hath not exercised the greatest pens, why this alone

should be overlooked by all men of great genius and erudition, and

delivered up to the Goths and Vandals as their lawful property, is

altogether as difficult to determine. And yet that this is the case,

with some very few exceptions, is most manifest. Of these I shall

willingly admit Burnet and Addison; if the former was not, perhaps, to

be considered as a political essayist, and the latter as a commentator

on the classics, rather than as a writer of travels; which last title,

perhaps, they would both of them have been least ambitious to affect.

Indeed, if these two and two or three more should be removed from

the mass, there would remain such a heap of dullness behind, that the

appellation of voyage-writer would not appear very desirable. I am

not here unapprised that old Homer himself is by some considered as a

voyage-writer; and, indeed, the beginning of his Odyssey may be urged

to countenance that opinion, which I shall not controvert. But, whatever

species of writing the Odyssey is of, it is surely at the head of that

species, as much as the Iliad is of another; and so far the excellent

Longinus would allow, I believe, at this day.

But, in reality, the Odyssey, the Telemachus, and all of that kind, are

to the voyage-writing I here intend, what romance is to true history,

the former being the confounder and corrupter of the latter. I am far

from supposing that Homer, Hesiod, and the other ancient poets and

mythologists, had any settled design to pervert and confuse the records

of antiquity; but it is certain they have effected it; and for my part I

must confess I should have honored and loved Homer more had he written

a true history of his own times in humble prose, than those noble poems

that have so justly collected the praise of all ages; for, though I read

these with more admiration and astonishment, I still read Herodotus,

Thucydides, and Xenophon with more amusement and more satisfaction. The

original poets were not, however, without excuse. They found the limits

of nature too straight for the immensity of their genius, which they had

not room to exert without extending fact by fiction: and that especially

at a time when the manners of men were too simple to afford that variety

which they have since offered in vain to the choice of the meanest

writers. In doing this they are again excusable for the manner in which

they have done it.

Ut speciosa dehine miracula promant.

They are not, indeed, so properly said to turn reality into fiction,

as fiction into reality. Their paintings are so bold, their colors so

strong, that everything they touch seems to exist in the very manner

they represent it; their portraits are so just, and their landscapes so

beautiful, that we acknowledge the strokes of nature in both, without

inquiring whether Nature herself, or her journeyman the poet, formed the

first pattern of the piece. But other writers (I will put Pliny at their

head) have no such pretensions to indulgence; they lie for lying sake,

or in order insolently to impose the most monstrous improbabilities and

absurdities upon their readers on their own authority; treating them as

some fathers treat children, and as other fathers do laymen, exacting

their belief of whatever they relate, on no other foundation than their

own authority, without ever taking the pains or adapting their lies to

human credulity, and of calculating them for the meridian of a common

understanding; but, with as much weakness as wickedness, and with more

impudence often than either, they assert facts contrary to the honor of

God, to the visible order of the creation, to the known laws of nature,

to the histories of former ages, and to the experience of our own,

and which no man can at once understand and believe. If it should

be objected (and it can nowhere be objected better than where I now

write, [12] as there is nowhere more pomp of bigotry) that whole nations

have been firm believers in such most absurd suppositions, I reply,

the fact is not true. They have known nothing of the matter, and have

believed they knew not what. It is, indeed, with me no matter of doubt

but that the pope and his clergy might teach any of those Christian

heterodoxies, the tenets of which are the most diametrically opposite to

their own; nay, all the doctrines of Zoroaster, Confucius, and Mahomet,

not only with certain and immediate success, but without one Catholic in

a thousand knowing he had changed his religion.

[Footnote 12: At Lisbon.]

What motive a man can have to sit down, and to draw forth a list of

stupid, senseless, incredible lies upon paper, would be difficult to

determine, did not Vanity present herself so immediately as the adequate

cause. The vanity of knowing more than other men is, perhaps, besides

hunger, the only inducement to writing, at least to publishing, at all.

Why then should not the voyage-writer be inflamed with the glory of

having seen what no man ever did or will see but himself? This is

the true source of the wonderful in the discourse and writings, and

sometimes, I believe, in the actions of men. There is another fault, of

a kind directly opposite to this, to which these writers are sometimes

liable, when, instead of filling their pages with monsters which nobody

hath ever seen, and with adventures which never have, nor could possibly

have, happened to them, waste their time and paper with recording things

and facts of so common a kind, that they challenge no other right of

being remembered than as they had the honor of having happened to the

author, to whom nothing seems trivial that in any manner happens to

himself.

Of such consequence do his own actions appear to one of this kind, that

he would probably think himself guilty of infidelity should he omit the

minutest thing in the detail of his journal. That the fact is true is

sufficient to give it a place there, without any consideration whether

it is capable of pleasing or surprising, of diverting or informing, the

reader. I have seen a play (if I mistake not it is one of Mrs. Behn's

or of Mrs. Centlivre's) where this vice in a voyage-writer is finely

ridiculed. An ignorant pedant, to whose government, for I know not what

reason, the conduct of a young nobleman in his travels is committed, and

who is sent abroad to show my lord the world, of which he knows nothing

himself, before his departure from a town, calls for his Journal to

record the goodness of the wine and tobacco, with other articles of the

same importance, which are to furnish the materials of a voyage at his

return home. The humor, it is true, is here carried very far; and yet,

perhaps, very little beyond what is to be found in writers who profess

no intention of dealing in humor at all. Of one or other, or both of

these kinds, are, I conceive, all that vast pile of books which pass

under the names of voyages, travels, adventures, lives, memoirs,

histories, etc., some of which a single traveler sends into the world in

many volumes, and others are, by judicious booksellers, collected into

vast bodies in folio, and inscribed with their own names, as if they

were indeed their own travels: thus unjustly attributing to themselves

the merit of others.

Now, from both these faults we have endeavored to steer clear in the

following narrative; which, however the contrary may be insinuated by

ignorant, unlearned, and fresh-water critics, who have never traveled

either in books or ships, I do solemnly declare doth, in my own

impartial opinion, deviate less from truth than any other voyage extant;

my lord Anson's alone being, perhaps, excepted. Some few embellishments

must be allowed to every historian; for we are not to conceive that the

speeches in Livy, Sallust, or Thucydides, were literally spoken in the

very words in which we now read them. It is sufficient that every fact

hath its foundation in truth, as I do seriously aver is the ease in

the ensuing pages; and when it is so, a good critic will be so far

from denying all kind of ornament of style or diction, or even of

circumstance, to his author, that he would be rather sorry if he omitted

it; for he could hence derive no other advantage than the loss of an

additional pleasure in the perusal.

Again, if any merely common incident should appear in this journal,

which will seldom I apprehend be the case, the candid reader will

easily perceive it is not introduced for its own sake, but for some

observations and reflections naturally resulting from it; and which,

if but little to his amusement, tend directly to the instruction of

the reader or to the information of the public; to whom if I choose to

convey such instruction or information with an air of joke and laughter,

none but the dullest of fellows will, I believe, censure it; but if

they should, I have the authority of more than one passage in Horace to

allege in my defense. Having thus endeavored to obviate some censures,

to which a man without the gift of foresight, or any fear of the

imputation of being a conjurer, might conceive this work would be

liable, I might now undertake a more pleasing task, and fall at once to

the direct and positive praises of the work itself; of which indeed, I

could say a thousand good things; but the task is so very pleasant that

I shall leave it wholly to the reader, and it is all the task that I

impose on him. A moderation for which he may think himself obliged to me

when he compares it with the conduct of authors, who often fill a whole

sheet with their own praises, to which they sometimes set their own real

names, and sometimes a fictitious one. One hint, however, I must give

the kind reader; which is, that if he should be able to find no sort of

amusement in the book, he will be pleased to remember the public utility

which will arise from it. If entertainment, as Mr. Richardson observes,

be but a secondary consideration in a romance; with which Mr. Addison, I

think, agrees, affirming the use of the pastry cook to be the first; if

this, I say, be true of a mere work of invention, sure it may well be

so considered in a work founded, like this, on truth; and where the

political reflections form so distinguishing a part. But perhaps I may

hear, from some critic of the most saturnine complexion, that my vanity

must have made a horrid dupe of my judgment, if it hath flattered me

with an expectation of having anything here seen in a grave light, or of

conveying any useful instruction to the public, or to their guardians. I

answer, with the great man whom I just now quoted, that my purpose is

to convey instruction in the vehicle of entertainment; and so to

bring about at once, like the revolution in the Rehearsal, a

perfect reformation of the laws relating to our maritime affairs: an

undertaking, I will not say more modest, but surely more feasible, than

that of reforming a whole people, by making use of a vehicular story, to

wheel in among them worse manners than their own.

INTRODUCTION

In the beginning of August, 1753, when I had taken the duke of

Portland's medicine, as it is called, near a year, the effects of which

had been the carrying off the symptoms of a lingering imperfect gout, I

was persuaded by Mr. Ranby, the king's premier sergeant-surgeon, and the

ablest advice, I believe, in all branches of the physical profession,

to go immediately to Bath. I accordingly wrote that very night to Mrs.

Bowden, who, by the next post, informed me she had taken me a lodging

for a month certain. Within a few days after this, whilst I was

preparing for my journey, and when I was almost fatigued to death with

several long examinations, relating to five different murders,

all committed within the space of a week, by different gangs of

street-robbers, I received a message from his grace the duke of

Newcastle, by Mr. Carrington, the king's messenger, to attend his

grace the next morning, in Lincoln's-inn-fields, upon some business of

importance; but I excused myself from complying with the message, as,

besides being lame, I was very ill with the great fatigues I had lately

undergone added to my distemper.

His grace, however, sent Mr. Carrington, the very next morning,

with another summons; with which, though in the utmost distress, I

immediately complied; but the duke, happening, unfortunately for me,

to be then particularly engaged, after I had waited some time, sent a

gentleman to discourse with me on the best plan which could be invented

for putting an immediate end to those murders and robberies which were

every day committed in the streets; upon which I promised to transmit

my opinion, in writing, to his grace, who, as the gentleman informed me,

intended to lay it before the privy council.

Though this visit cost me a severe cold, I, notwithstanding, set myself

down to work; and in about four days sent the duke as regular a plan

as I could form, with all the reasons and arguments I could bring to

support it, drawn out in several sheets of paper; and soon received a

message from the duke by Mr. Carrington, acquainting me that my plan was

highly approved of, and that all the terms of it would be complied

with. The principal and most material of those terms was the immediately

depositing six hundred pound in my hands; at which small charge I

undertook to demolish the then reigning gangs, and to put the civil

policy into such order, that no such gangs should ever be able, for the

future, to form themselves into bodies, or at least to remain any time

formidable to the public.

I had delayed my Bath journey for some time, contrary to the repeated

advice of my physical acquaintance, and to the ardent desire of my

warmest friends, though my distemper was now turned to a deep jaundice;

in which case the Bath waters are generally reputed to be almost

infallible. But I had the most eager desire of demolishing this gang of

villains and cut-throats, which I was sure of accomplishing the moment

I was enabled to pay a fellow who had undertaken, for a small sum, to

betray them into the hands of a set of thief-takers whom I had

enlisted into the service, all men of known and approved fidelity and

intrepidity.

After some weeks the money was paid at the treasury, and within a few

days after two hundred pounds of it had come to my hands, the whole

gang of cut-throats was entirely dispersed, seven of them were in actual

custody, and the rest driven, some out of the town, and others out of

the kingdom. Though my health was now reduced to the last extremity,

I continued to act with the utmost vigor against these villains; in

examining whom, and in taking the depositions against them, I have often

spent whole days, nay, sometimes whole nights, especially when there was

any difficulty in procuring sufficient evidence to convict them; which

is a very common case in street-robberies, even when the guilt of the

party is sufficiently apparent to satisfy the most tender conscience.

But courts of justice know nothing of a cause more than what is told

them on oath by a witness; and the most flagitious villain upon earth is

tried in the same manner as a man of the best character who is accused

of the same crime. Meanwhile, amidst all my fatigues and distresses, I

had the satisfaction to find my endeavors had been attended with such

success that this hellish society were almost utterly extirpated, and

that, instead of reading of murders and street-robberies in the news

almost every morning, there was, in the remaining part of the month of

November, and in all December, not only no such thing as a murder, but

not even a street-robbery committed. Some such, indeed, were mentioned

in the public papers; but they were all found on the strictest inquiry,

to be false. In this entire freedom from street-robberies, during the

dark months, no man will, I believe, scruple to acknowledge that the

winter of 1753 stands unrivaled, during a course of many years; and this

may possibly appear the more extraordinary to those who recollect

the outrages with which it began. Having thus fully accomplished my

undertaking, I went into the country, in a very weak and deplorable

condition, with no fewer or less diseases than a jaundice, a dropsy, and

an asthma, altogether uniting their forces in the destruction of a body

so entirely emaciated that it had lost all its muscular flesh. Mine was

now no longer what was called a Bath case; nor, if it had been so, had

I strength remaining sufficient to go thither, a ride of six miles only

being attended with an intolerable fatigue. I now discharged my lodgings

at Bath, which I had hitherto kept. I began in earnest to look on my

case as desperate, and I had vanity enough to rank myself with those

heroes who, of old times, became voluntary sacrifices to the good of the

public. But, lest the reader should be too eager to catch at the

word VANITY, and should be unwilling to indulge me with so sublime a

gratification, for I think he is not too apt to gratify me, I will take

my key a pitch lower, and will frankly own that I had a stronger motive

than the love of the public to push me on: I will therefore confess to

him that my private affairs at the beginning of the winter had but a

gloomy aspect; for I had not plundered the public or the poor of those

sums which men, who are always ready to plunder both as much as they

can, have been pleased to suspect me of taking: on the contrary, by

composing, instead of inflaming the quarrels of porters and beggars

(which I blush when I say hath not been universally practiced), and by

refusing to take a shilling from a man who most undoubtedly would not

have had another left, I had reduced an income of about five hundred

pounds [13] a-year of the dirtiest money upon earth to little more than

three hundred pounds; a considerable proportion of which remained with

my clerk; and, indeed, if the whole had done so, as it ought, he would

be but ill paid for sitting almost sixteen hours in the twenty-four in

the most unwholesome, as well as nauseous air in the universe, and which

hath in his case corrupted a good constitution without contaminating his

morals.

[Footnote 13: A predecessor of mine used to boast that he made one thousand

pounds a-year in his office; but how he did this (if indeed he did it)

is to me a secret. His clerk, now mine, told me I had more business than

he had ever known there; I am sure I had as much as any man could do.

The truth is, the fees are so very low, when any are due, and so much is

done for nothing, that, if a single justice of peace had business enough

to employ twenty clerks, neither he nor they would get much by their

labor.]

The public will not, therefore, I hope, think I betray a secret when I

inform them that I received from the Government a yearly pension out

of the public service money; which, I believe, indeed, would have been

larger had my great patron been convinced of an error, which I have

heard him utter more than once, that he could not indeed say that

the acting as a principal justice of peace in Westminster was on all

accounts very desirable, but that all the world knew it was a very

lucrative office. Now, to have shown him plainly that a man must be a

rogue to make a very little this way, and that he could not make much

by being as great a rogue as he could be, would have required more

confidence than, I believe, he had in me, and more of his conversation

than he chose to allow me; I therefore resigned the office and

the farther execution of my plan to my brother, who had long been

my assistant. And now, lest the case between me and the reader should

be the same in both instances as it was between me and the great man, I

will not add another word on the subject.

But, not to trouble the reader with anecdotes, contrary to my own rule

laid down in my preface, I assure him I thought my family was very

slenderly provided for; and that my health began to decline so fast that

I had very little more of life left to accomplish what I had thought of

too late. I rejoiced therefore greatly in seeing an opportunity, as I

apprehended, of gaining such merit in the eye of the public, that, if my

life were the sacrifice to it, my friends might think they did a popular

act in putting my family at least beyond the reach of necessity, which I

myself began to despair of doing. And though I disclaim all pretense to

that Spartan or Roman patriotism which loved the public so well that it

was always ready to become a voluntary sacrifice to the public good, I

do solemnly declare I have that love for my family.

After this confession therefore, that the public was not the principal

deity to which my life was offered a sacrifice, and when it is farther

considered what a poor sacrifice this was, being indeed no other than

the giving up what I saw little likelihood of being able to hold much

longer, and which, upon the terms I held it, nothing but the weakness

of human nature could represent to me as worth holding at all; the world

may, I believe, without envy, allow me all the praise to which I have

any title. My aim, in fact, was not praise, which is the last gift they

care to bestow; at least, this was not my aim as an end, but rather as a

means of purchasing some moderate provision for my family, which, though

it should exceed my merit, must fall infinitely short of my service, if

I succeeded in my attempt. To say the truth, the public never act more

wisely than when they act most liberally in the distribution of their

rewards; and here the good they receive is often more to be considered

than the motive from which they receive it. Example alone is the end

of all public punishments and rewards. Laws never inflict disgrace in

resentment, nor confer honor from gratitude. "For it is very hard, my

lord," said a convicted felon at the bar to the late excellent judge

Burnet, "to hang a poor man for stealing a horse." "You are not to be

hanged sir," answered my ever-honored and beloved friend, "for stealing

a horse, but you are to be hanged that horses may not be stolen." In

like manner it might have been said to the late duke of Marlborough,

when the parliament was so deservedly liberal to him, after the battle

of Blenheim, "You receive not these honors and bounties on account of a

victory past, but that other victories may be obtained."

I was now, in the opinion of all men, dying of a complication of

disorders; and, were I desirous of playing the advocate, I have an

occasion fair enough; but I disdain such an attempt. I relate facts

plainly and simply as they are; and let the world draw from them what

conclusions they please, taking with them the following facts for their

instruction: the one is, that the proclamation offering one hundred

pounds for the apprehending felons for certain felonies committed in

certain places, which I prevented from being revived, had formerly cost

the government several thousand pounds within a single year. Secondly,

that all such proclamations, instead of curing the evil, had actually

increased it; had multiplied the number of robberies; had propagated

the worst and wickedest of perjuries; had laid snares for youth and

ignorance, which, by the temptation of these rewards, had been sometimes

drawn into guilt; and sometimes, which cannot be thought on without the

highest horror, had destroyed them without it. Thirdly, that my plan had

not put the government to more than three hundred pound expense, and had

produced none of the ill consequences above mentioned; but, lastly, had

actually suppressed the evil for a time, and had plainly pointed out the

means of suppressing it for ever. This I would myself have undertaken,

had my health permitted, at the annual expense of the above-mentioned

sum.

After having stood the terrible six weeks which succeeded last

Christmas, and put a lucky end, if they had known their own interests,

to such numbers of aged and infirm valetudinarians, who might have

gasped through two or three mild winters more, I returned to town in

February, in a condition less despaired of by myself than by any of my

friends. I now became the patient of Dr. Ward, who wished I had taken

his advice earlier. By his advice I was tapped, and fourteen quarts

of water drawn from my belly. The sudden relaxation which this caused,

added to my enervate, emaciated habit of body, so weakened me that

within two days I was thought to be falling into the agonies of death. I

was at the worst on that memorable day when the public lost Mr. Pelham.

From that day I began slowly, as it were, to draw my feet out of the

grave; till in two months' time I had again acquired some little degree

of strength, but was again full of water. During this whole time I took

Mr. Ward's medicines, which had seldom any perceptible operation. Those

in particular of the diaphoretic kind, the working of which is thought

to require a great strength of constitution to support, had so little

effect on me, that Mr. Ward declared it was as vain to attempt sweating

me as a deal board. In this situation I was tapped a second time. I had

one quart of water less taken from me now than before; but I bore all

the consequences of the operation much better. This I attributed greatly

to a dose of laudanum prescribed by my surgeon. It first gave me the

most delicious flow of spirits, and afterwards as comfortable a nap.

The month of May, which was now begun, it seemed reasonable to

expect would introduce the spring, and drive of that winter which yet

maintained its footing on the stage. I resolved therefore to visit a

little house of mine in the country, which stands at Ealing, in the

county of Middlesex, in the best air, I believe, in the whole kingdom,

and far superior to that of Kensington Gravel-pits; for the gravel is

here much wider and deeper, the place higher and more open towards the

south, whilst it is guarded from the north wind by a ridge of hills, and

from the smells and smoke of London by its distance; which last is not

the fate of Kensington, when the wind blows from any corner of the east.

Obligations to Mr. Ward I shall always confess; for I am convinced that

he omitted no care in endeavoring to serve me, without any expectation

or desire of fee or reward.

The powers of Mr. Ward's remedies want indeed no unfair puffs of mine

to give them credit; and though this distemper of the dropsy stands, I

believe, first in the list of those over which he is always certain of

triumphing, yet, possibly, there might be something particular in my

case capable of eluding that radical force which had healed so many

thousands. The same distemper, in different constitutions, may possibly

be attended with such different symptoms, that to find an infallible

nostrum for the curing any one distemper in every patient may be almost

as difficult as to find a panacea for the cure of all.

But even such a panacea one of the greatest scholars and best of men

did lately apprehend he had discovered. It is true, indeed, he was no

physician; that is, he had not by the forms of his education acquired

a right of applying his skill in the art of physic to his own private

advantage; and yet, perhaps, it may be truly asserted that no other

modern hath contributed so much to make his physical skill useful to the

public; at least, that none hath undergone the pains of communicating

this discovery in writing to the world. The reader, I think, will scarce

need to be informed that the writer I mean is the late bishop of Cloyne,

in Ireland, and the discovery that of the virtues of tar-water.

I then happened to recollect, upon a hint given me by the inimitable

and shamefully-distressed author of the Female Quixote, that I had

many years before, from curiosity only, taken a cursory view of bishop

Berkeley's treatise on the virtues of tar-water, which I had formerly

observed he strongly contends to be that real panacea which Sydenham

supposes to have an existence in nature, though it yet remains

undiscovered, and perhaps will always remain so.

Upon the reperusal of this book I found the bishop only asserting his

opinion that tar-water might be useful in the dropsy, since he had known

it to have a surprising success in the cure of a most stubborn anasarca,

which is indeed no other than, as the word implies, the dropsy of the

flesh; and this was, at that time, a large part of my complaint.

After a short trial, therefore, of a milk diet, which I presently found

did not suit with my case, I betook myself to the bishop's prescription,

and dosed myself every morning and evening with half a pint of

tar-water.

It was no more than three weeks since my last tapping, and my belly and

limbs were distended with water. This did not give me the worse opinion

of tar-water; for I never supposed there could be any such virtue

in tar-water as immediately to carry off a quantity of water already

collected. For my delivery from this I well knew I must be again obliged

to the trochar; and that if the tar-water did me any good at all it

must be only by the slowest degrees; and that if it should ever get

the better of my distemper it must be by the tedious operation of

undermining, and not by a sudden attack and storm.

Some visible effects, however, and far beyond what my most sanguine

hopes could with any modesty expect, I very soon experienced; the

tar-water having, from the very first, lessened my illness, increased

my appetite, and added, though in a very slow proportion, to my bodily

strength. But if my strength had increased a little my water daily

increased much more. So that, by the end of May, my belly became again

ripe for the trochar, and I was a third time tapped; upon which, two

very favorable symptoms appeared. I had three quarts of water taken from

me less than had been taken the last time; and I bore the relaxation

with much less (indeed with scarce any) faintness.

Those of my physical friends on whose judgment I chiefly depended seemed

to think my only chance of life consisted in having the whole summer

before me; in which I might hope to gather sufficient strength to

encounter the inclemencies of the ensuing winter. But this chance began

daily to lessen. I saw the summer mouldering away, or rather, indeed,

the year passing away without intending to bring on any summer at all.

In the whole month of May the sun scarce appeared three times. So that

the early fruits came to the fullness of their growth, and to some

appearance of ripeness, without acquiring any real maturity; having

wanted the heat of the sun to soften and meliorate their juices. I saw

the dropsy gaining rather than losing ground; the distance growing still

shorter between the tappings. I saw the asthma likewise beginning again

to become more troublesome. I saw the midsummer quarter drawing towards

a close. So that I conceived, if the Michaelmas quarter should steal

off in the same manner, as it was, in my opinion, very much to be

apprehended it would, I should be delivered up to the attacks of winter

before I recruited my forces, so as to be anywise able to withstand

them.

I now began to recall an intention, which from the first dawnings of my

recovery I had conceived, of removing to a warmer climate; and, finding

this to be approved of by a very eminent physician, I resolved to put

it into immediate execution. Aix in Provence was the place first thought

on; but the difficulties of getting thither were insuperable. The

Journey by land, beside the expense of it, was infinitely too long and

fatiguing; and I could hear of no ship that was likely to set out from

London, within any reasonable time, for Marseilles, or any other port in

that part of the Mediterranean.

Lisbon was presently fixed on in its room. The air here, as it was near

four degrees to the south of Aix, must be more mild and warm, and the

winter shorter and less piercing.

It was not difficult to find a ship bound to a place with which we carry

on so immense a trade. Accordingly, my brother soon informed me of the

excellent accommodations for passengers which were to be found on board

a ship that was obliged to sail for Lisbon in three days. I eagerly

embraced the offer, notwithstanding the shortness of the time; and,

having given my brother full power to contract for our passage, I began

to prepare my family for the voyage with the utmost expedition.

But our great haste was needless; for the captain having twice put off

his sailing, I at length invited him to dinner with me at Fordhook, a

full week after the time on which he had declared, and that with many

asseverations, he must and would weigh anchor.

He dined with me according to his appointment; and when all matters

were settled between us, left me with positive orders to be on board the

Wednesday following, when he declared he would fall down the river

to Gravesend, and would not stay a moment for the greatest man in the

world. He advised me to go to Gravesend by land, and there wait the

arrival of his ship, assigning many reasons for this, every one of which

was, as I well remember, among those that had before determined me to go

on board near the Tower.

THE VOYAGE

WEDNESDAY, June 26, 1754.--On this day the most melancholy sun I had

ever beheld arose, and found me awake at my house at Fordhook. By the

light of this sun I was, in my own opinion, last to behold and take

leave of some of those creatures on whom I doted with a mother-like

fondness, guided by nature and passion, and uncured and unhardened by

all the doctrine of that philosophical school where I had learned to

bear pains and to despise death. In this situation, as I could not

conquer Nature, I submitted entirely to her, and she made as great a

fool of me as she had ever done of any woman whatsoever; under pretense

of giving me leave to enjoy, she drew me in to suffer, the company of my

little ones during eight hours; and I doubt not whether, in that time, I

did not undergo more than in all my distemper.

At twelve precisely my coach was at the door, which was no sooner told

me than I kissed my children round, and went into it with some little

resolution. My wife, who behaved more like a heroine and philosopher,

though at the same time the tenderest mother in the world, and my eldest

daughter, followed me; some friends went with us, and others here took

their leave; and I heard my behavior applauded, with many murmurs

and praises to which I well knew I had no title; as all other such

philosophers may, if they have any modesty, confess on the like

occasions.

In two hours we arrived in Rotherhithe, and immediately went on board,

and were to have sailed the next morning; but, as this was the king's

proclamation-day, and consequently a holiday at the custom-house, the

captain could not clear his vessel till the Thursday; for these holidays

are as strictly observed as those in the popish calendar, and are almost

as numerous. I might add that both are opposite to the genius of trade,

and consequently contra bonum publicum.

To go on board the ship it was necessary first to go into a boat; a

matter of no small difficulty, as I had no use of my limbs, and was

to be carried by men who, though sufficiently strong for their burden,

were, like Archimedes, puzzled to find a steady footing. Of this, as

few of my readers have not gone into wherries on the Thames, they will

easily be able to form to themselves an idea. However, by the assistance

of my friend, Mr. Welch, whom I never think or speak of but with love

and esteem, I conquered this difficulty, as I did afterwards that of

ascending the ship, into which I was hoisted with more ease by a chair

lifted with pulleys. I was soon seated in a great chair in the cabin,

to refresh myself after a fatigue which had been more intolerable, in a

quarter of a mile's passage from my coach to the ship, than I had before

undergone in a land-journey of twelve miles, which I had traveled with

the utmost expedition.

This latter fatigue was, perhaps, somewhat heightened by an indignation

which I could not prevent arising in my mind. I think, upon my entrance

into the boat, I presented a spectacle of the highest horror. The total

loss of limbs was apparent to all who saw me, and my face contained

marks of a most diseased state, if not of death itself. Indeed, so

ghastly was my countenance, that timorous women with child had abstained

from my house, for fear of the ill consequences of looking at me. In

this condition I ran the gauntlope (so I think I may justly call it)

through rows of sailors and watermen, few of whom failed of paying their

compliments to me by all manner of insults and jests on my misery. No

man who knew me will think I conceived any personal resentment at this

behavior; but it was a lively picture of that cruelty and inhumanity

in the nature of men which I have often contemplated with concern, and

which leads the mind into a train of very uncomfortable and melancholy

thoughts. It may be said that this barbarous custom is peculiar to

the English, and of them only to the lowest degree; that it is an

excrescence of an uncontrolled licentiousness mistaken for liberty, and

never shows itself in men who are polished and refined in such manner

as human nature requires to produce that perfection of which it is

susceptible, and to purge away that malevolence of disposition of which,

at our birth, we partake in common with the savage creation. This may

be said, and this is all that can be said; and it is, I am afraid, but

little satisfactory to account for the inhumanity of those who, while

they boast of being made after God's own image, seem to bear in their

minds a resemblance of the vilest species of brutes; or rather, indeed,

of our idea of devils; for I don't know that any brutes can be taxed

with such malevolence. A sirloin of beef was now placed on the table,

for which, though little better than carrion, as much was charged by the

master of the little paltry ale-house who dressed it as would have been

demanded for all the elegance of the King's Arms, or any other polite

tavern or eating-house! for, indeed, the difference between the best

house and the worst is, that at the former you pay largely for luxury,

at the latter for nothing.

Thursday, June 27.--This morning the captain, who lay on shore at his

own house, paid us a visit in the cabin, and behaved like an angry

bashaw, declaring that, had he known we were not to be pleased, he would

not have carried us for five hundred pounds. He added many asseverations

that he was a gentleman, and despised money; not forgetting several

hints of the presents which had been made him for his cabin, of twenty,

thirty, and forty guineas, by several gentlemen, over and above the sum

for which they had contracted. This behavior greatly surprised me, as I

knew not how to account for it, nothing having happened since we parted

from the captain the evening before in perfect good humor; and all this

broke forth on the first moment of his arrival this morning. He did

not, however, suffer my amazement to have any long continuance before

he clearly showed me that all this was meant only as an apology to

introduce another procrastination (being the fifth) of his weighing

anchor, which was now postponed till Saturday, for such was his will and

pleasure.

Besides the disagreeable situation in which we then lay, in the confines

of Wapping and Rotherhithe, tasting a delicious mixture of the air of

both these sweet places, and enjoying the concord of sweet sounds of

seamen, watermen, fish-women, oyster-women, and of all the vociferous

inhabitants of both shores, composing altogether a greater variety of

harmony than Hogarth's imagination hath brought together in that print

of his, which is enough to make a man deaf to look at--I had a more

urgent cause to press our departure, which was, that the dropsy, for

which I had undergone three tappings, seemed to threaten me with a

fourth discharge before I should reach Lisbon, and when I should have

nobody on board capable of performing the operation; but I was obliged

to hearken to the voice of reason, if I may use the captain's own words,

and to rest myself contented. Indeed, there was no alternative within my

reach but what would have cost me much too dear. There are many evils

in society from which people of the highest rank are so entirely exempt,

that they have not the least knowledge or idea of them; nor indeed of

the characters which are formed by them. Such, for instance, is the

conveyance of goods and passengers from one place to another. Now there

is no such thing as any kind of knowledge contemptible in itself; and,

as the particular knowledge I here mean is entirely necessary to the

well understanding and well enjoying this journal; and, lastly, as in

this case the most ignorant will be those very readers whose amusement

we chiefly consult, and to whom we wish to be supposed principally to

write, we will here enter somewhat largely into the discussion of this

matter; the rather, for that no ancient or modern author (if we can

trust the catalogue of doctor Mead's library) hath ever undertaken it,

but that it seems (in the style of Don Quixote) a task reserved for my

pen alone.

When I first conceived this intention I began to entertain thoughts of

inquiring into the antiquity of traveling; and, as many persons have

performed in this way (I mean have traveled) at the expense of the

public, I flattered myself that the spirit of improving arts and

sciences, and of advancing useful and substantial learning, which

so eminently distinguishes this age, and hath given rise to more

speculative societies in Europe than I at present can recollect the

names of--perhaps, indeed, than I or any other, besides their very near

neighbors, ever heard mentioned--would assist in promoting so curious

a work; a work begun with the same views, calculated for the same

purposes, and fitted for the same uses, with the labors which those

right honorable societies have so cheerfully undertaken themselves,

and encouraged in others; sometimes with the highest honors, even with

admission into their colleges, and with enrollment among their members.

From these societies I promised myself all assistance in their power,

particularly the communication of such valuable manuscripts and records

as they must be supposed to have collected from those obscure ages

of antiquity when history yields us such imperfect accounts of the

residence, and much more imperfect of the travels, of the human race;

unless, perhaps, as a curious and learned member of the young Society

of Antiquarians is said to have hinted his conjectures, that their

residence and their travels were one and the same; and this discovery

(for such it seems to be) he is said to have owed to the lighting by

accident on a book, which we shall have occasion to mention presently,

the contents of which were then little known to the society.

The king of Prussia, moreover, who, from a degree of benevolence

and taste which in either case is a rare production in so northern a

climate, is the great encourager of art and science, I was well assured

would promote so useful a design, and order his archives to be searched

on my behalf. But after well weighing all these advantages, and much

meditation on the order of my work, my whole design was subverted in a

moment by hearing of the discovery just mentioned to have been made by

the young antiquarian, who, from the most ancient record in the world

(though I don't find the society are all agreed on this point), one long

preceding the date of the earliest modern collections, either of books

or butterflies, none of which pretend to go beyond the flood, shows

us that the first man was a traveler, and that he and his family were

scarce settled in Paradise before they disliked their own home, and

became passengers to another place. Hence it appears that the humor of

traveling is as old as the human race, and that it was their curse from

the beginning. By this discovery my plan became much shortened, and

I found it only necessary to treat of the conveyance of goods and

passengers from place to place; which, not being universally known,

seemed proper to be explained before we examined into its original.

There are indeed two different ways of tracing all things used by the

historian and the antiquary; these are upwards and downwards.

The former shows you how things are, and leaves to others to discover

when they began to be so. The latter shows you how things were, and

leaves their present existence to be examined by others. Hence the

former is more useful, the latter more curious. The former receives the

thanks of mankind; the latter of that valuable part, the virtuosi.

In explaining, therefore, this mystery of carrying goods and passengers

from one place to another, hitherto so profound a secret to the very

best of our readers, we shall pursue the historical method, and endeavor

to show by what means it is at present performed, referring the more

curious inquiry either to some other pen or to some other opportunity.

Now there are two general ways of performing (if God permit) this

conveyance, viz., by land and water, both of which have much variety;

that by land being performed in different vehicles, such as coaches,

caravans, wagons, etc.; and that by water in ships, barges, and boats,

of various sizes and denominations. But, as all these methods of

conveyance are formed on the same principles, they agree so well

together, that it is fully sufficient to comprehend them all in the

general view, without descending to such minute particulars as would

distinguish one method from another.

Common to all of these is one general principle that, as the goods to be

conveyed are usually the larger, so they are to be chiefly considered in

the conveyance; the owner being indeed little more than an appendage to

his trunk, or box, or bale, or at best a small part of his own baggage,

very little care is to be taken in stowing or packing them up with

convenience to himself; for the conveyance is not of passengers and

goods, but of goods and passengers.

Secondly, from this conveyance arises a new kind of relation, or rather

of subjection, in the society, by which the passenger becomes bound in

allegiance to his conveyer. This allegiance is indeed only temporary

and local, but the most absolute during its continuance of any known in

Great Britain, and, to say truth, scarce consistent with the liberties

of a free people, nor could it be reconciled with them, did it not move

downwards; a circumstance universally apprehended to be incompatible

to all kinds of slavery; for Aristotle in his Politics hath proved

abundantly to my satisfaction that no men are born to be slaves, except

barbarians; and these only to such as are not themselves barbarians; and

indeed Mr. Montesquieu hath carried it very little farther in the case

of the Africans; the real truth being that no man is born to be a slave,

unless to him who is able to make him so.

Thirdly, this subjection is absolute, and consists of a perfect

resignation both of body and soul to the disposal of another; after

which resignation, during a certain time, his subject retains no more

power over his own will than an Asiatic slave, or an English wife, by

the laws of both countries, and by the customs of one of them. If I

should mention the instance of a stage-coachman, many of my readers

would recognize the truth of what I have here observed; all, indeed,

that ever have been under the dominion of that tyrant, who in this free

country is as absolute as a Turkish bashaw. In two particulars only his

power is defective; he cannot press you into his service, and if you

enter yourself at one place, on condition of being discharged at a

certain time at another, he is obliged to perform his agreement, if

God permit, but all the intermediate time you are absolutely under his

government; he carries you how he will, when he will, and whither he

will, provided it be not much out of the road; you have nothing to eat

or to drink, but what, and when, and where he pleases. Nay, you cannot

sleep unless he pleases you should; for he will order you sometimes out

of bed at midnight and hurry you away at a moment's warning: indeed, if

you can sleep in his vehicle he cannot prevent it; nay, indeed, to

give him his due, this he is ordinarily disposed to encourage: for the

earlier he forces you to rise in the morning, the more time he will give

you in the heat of the day, sometimes even six hours at an ale-house, or

at their doors, where he always gives you the same indulgence which

he allows himself; and for this he is generally very moderate in his

demands. I have known a whole bundle of passengers charged no more than

half-a-crown for being suffered to remain quiet at an ale-house door for

above a whole hour, and that even in the hottest day in summer. But as

this kind of tyranny, though it hath escaped our political writers,

hath been I think touched by our dramatic, and is more trite among

the generality of readers; and as this and all other kinds of such

subjection are alike unknown to my friends, I will quit the passengers

by land, and treat of those who travel by water; for whatever is said on

this subject is applicable to both alike, and we may bring them together

as closely as they are brought in the liturgy, when they are recommended

to the prayers of all Christian congregations; and (which I have often

thought very remarkable) where they are joined with other miserable

wretches, such as women in labor, people in sickness, infants just born,

prisoners and captives. Goods and passengers are conveyed by water in

divers vehicles, the principal of which being a ship, it shall suffice

to mention that alone. Here the tyrant doth not derive his title, as the

stage-coachman doth, from the vehicle itself in which he stows his goods

and passengers, but he is called the captain--a word of such various

use and uncertain signification, that it seems very difficult to fix any

positive idea to it: if, indeed, there be any general meaning which may

comprehend all its different uses, that of the head or chief of any body

of men seems to be most capable of this comprehension; for whether they

be a company of soldiers, a crew of sailors, or a gang of rogues, he who

is at the head of them is always styled the captain.

The particular tyrant whose fortune it was to stow us aboard laid a

farther claim to this appellation than the bare command of a vehicle of

conveyance. He had been the captain of a privateer, which he chose to

call being in the king's service, and thence derived a right of hoisting

the military ornament of a cockade over the button of his hat. He

likewise wore a sword of no ordinary length by his side, with which he

swaggered in his cabin, among the wretches his passengers, whom he had

stowed in cupboards on each side. He was a person of a very singular

character. He had taken it into his head that he was a gentleman, from

those very reasons that proved he was not one; and to show himself a

fine gentleman, by a behavior which seemed to insinuate he had never

seen one. He was, moreover, a man of gallantry; at the age of seventy

he had the finicalness of Sir Courtly Nice, with the roughness of Surly;

and, while he was deaf himself, had a voice capable of deafening all

others.

Now, as I saw myself in danger by the delays of the captain, who was, in

reality, waiting for more freight, and as the wind had been long nested,

as it were, in the southwest, where it constantly blew hurricanes, I

began with great reason to apprehend that our voyage might be long, and

that my belly, which began already to be much extended, would require

the water to be let out at a time when no assistance was at hand;

though, indeed, the captain comforted me with assurances that he had

a pretty young fellow on board who acted as his surgeon, as I found he

likewise did as steward, cook, butler, sailor. In short, he had as

many offices as Scrub in the play, and went through them all with great

dexterity; this of surgeon was, perhaps, the only one in which his skill

was somewhat deficient, at least that branch of tapping for the dropsy;

for he very ingenuously and modestly confessed he had never seen the

operation performed, nor was possessed of that chirurgical instrument

with which it is performed.

Friday, June 28.--By way of prevention, therefore, I this day sent for

my friend, Mr. Hunter, the great surgeon and anatomist of Covent-garden;

and, though my belly was not yet very full and tight, let out ten

quarts of water; the young sea-surgeon attended the operation, not as a

performer, but as a student.

I was now eased of the greatest apprehension which I had from the length

of the passage; and I told the captain I was become indifferent as

to the time of his sailing. He expressed much satisfaction in this

declaration, and at hearing from me that I found myself, since my

tapping, much lighter and better. In this, I believe, he was sincere;

for he was, as we shall have occasion to observe more than once, a very

good-natured man; and, as he was a very brave one too, I found that the

heroic constancy with which I had borne an operation that is attended

with scarce any degree of pain had not a little raised me in his esteem.

That he might adhere, therefore, in the most religious and rigorous

manner to his word, when he had no longer any temptation from interest

to break it, as he had no longer any hopes of more goods or passengers,

he ordered his ship to fall down to Gravesend on Sunday morning, and

there to wait his arrival.

Sunday, June 30.--Nothing worth notice passed till that morning, when

my poor wife, after passing a night in the utmost torments of the

toothache, resolved to have it drawn. I despatched therefore a servant

into Wapping to bring in haste the best tooth-drawer he could find.

He soon found out a female of great eminence in the art; but when he

brought her to the boat, at the waterside, they were informed that

the ship was gone; for indeed she had set out a few minutes after his

quitting her; nor did the pilot, who well knew the errand on which I had

sent my servant, think fit to wait a moment for his return, or to give

me any notice of his setting out, though I had very patiently attended

the delays of the captain four days, after many solemn promises of

weighing anchor every one of the three last. But of all the petty

bashaws or turbulent tyrants I ever beheld, this sour-faced pilot was

the worst tempered; for, during the time that he had the guidance of the

ship, which was till we arrived in the Downs, he complied with no one's

desires, nor did he give a civil word, or indeed a civil look, to any on

board.

The tooth-drawer, who, as I said before, was one of great eminence among

her neighbors, refused to follow the ship; so that my man made himself

the best of his way, and with some difficulty came up with us before we

were got under full sail; for after that, as we had both wind and tide

with us, he would have found it impossible to overtake the ship till she

was come to an anchor at Gravesend.

The morning was fair and bright, and we had a passage thither, I think,

as pleasant as can be conceived: for, take it with all its advantages,

particularly the number of fine ships you are always sure of seeing by

the way, there is nothing to equal it in all the rivers of the world.

The yards of Deptford and of Woolwich are noble sights, and give us a

just idea of the great perfection to which we are arrived in building

those floating castles, and the figure which we may always make in

Europe among the other maritime powers. That of Woolwich, at least, very

strongly imprinted this idea on my mind; for there was now on the stocks

there the Royal Anne, supposed to be the largest ship ever built, and

which contains ten carriage-guns more than had ever yet equipped a

first-rate.

It is true, perhaps, that there is more of ostentation than of real

utility in ships of this vast and unwieldy burden, which are rarely

capable of acting against an enemy; but if the building such contributes

to preserve, among other nations, the notion of the British superiority

in naval affairs, the expense, though very great, is well incurred, and

the ostentation is laudable and truly political. Indeed, I should be

sorry to allow that Holland, France, or Spain, possessed a vessel larger

and more beautiful than the largest and most beautiful of ours; for this

honor I would always administer to the pride of our sailors, who should

challenge it from all their neighbors with truth and success. And sure I

am that not our honest tars alone, but every inhabitant of this island,

may exult in the comparison, when he considers the king of Great Britain

as a maritime prince, in opposition to any other prince in Europe; but

I am not so certain that the same idea of superiority will result from

comparing our land forces with those of many other crowned heads. In

numbers they all far exceed us, and in the goodness and splendor of

their troops many nations, particularly the Germans and French, and

perhaps the Dutch, cast us at a distance; for, however we may flatter

ourselves with the Edwards and Henrys of former ages, the change of the

whole art of war since those days, by which the advantage of personal

strength is in a manner entirely lost, hath produced a change in

military affairs to the advantage of our enemies. As for our successes

in later days, if they were not entirely owing to the superior genius

of our general, they were not a little due to the superior force of his

money. Indeed, if we should arraign marshal Saxe of ostentation when

he showed his army, drawn up, to our captive general, the day after the

battle of La Val, we cannot say that the ostentation was entirely vain;

since he certainly showed him an army which had not been often equaled,

either in the number or goodness of the troops, and which, in those

respects, so far exceeded ours, that none can ever cast any reflection

on the brave young prince who could not reap the laurels of conquest in

that day; but his retreat will be always mentioned as an addition to his

glory.

In our marine the case is entirely the reverse, and it must be our own

fault if it doth not continue so; for continue so it will as long as the

flourishing state of our trade shall support it, and this support it can

never want till our legislature shall cease to give sufficient attention

to the protection of our trade, and our magistrates want sufficient

power, ability, and honesty, to execute the laws; a circumstance not

to be apprehended, as it cannot happen till our senates and our benches

shall be filled with the blindest ignorance, or with the blackest

corruption.

Besides the ships in the docks, we saw many on the water: the yachts

are sights of great parade, and the king's body yacht is, I believe,

unequaled in any country for convenience as well as magnificence;

both which are consulted in building and equipping her with the most

exquisite art and workmanship.

We saw likewise several Indiamen just returned from their voyage.

These are, I believe, the largest and finest vessels which are anywhere

employed in commercial affairs. The colliers, likewise, which are very

numerous, and even assemble in fleets, are ships of great bulk; and if

we descend to those used in the American, African, and European trades,

and pass through those which visit our own coasts, to the small craft

that lie between Chatham and the Tower, the whole forms a most pleasing

object to the eye, as well as highly warming to the heart of an

Englishman who has any degree of love for his country, or can recognize

any effect of the patriot in his constitution. Lastly, the Royal

Hospital at Greenwich, which presents so delightful a front to the

water, and doth such honor at once to its builder and the nation, to

the great skill and ingenuity of the one, and to the no less sensible

gratitude of the other, very properly closes the account of this scene;

which may well appear romantic to those who have not themselves seen

that, in this one instance, truth and reality are capable, perhaps, of

exceeding the power of fiction. When we had passed by Greenwich we saw

only two or three gentlemen's houses, all of very moderate account, till

we reached Gravesend: these are all on the Kentish shore, which affords

a much dryer, wholesomer, and pleasanter situation, than doth that of

its opposite, Essex. This circumstance, I own, is somewhat surprising

to me, when I reflect on the numerous villas that crowd the river from

Chelsea upwards as far as Shepperton, where the narrower channel affords

not half so noble a prospect, and where the continual succession of

the small craft, like the frequent repetition of all things, which have

nothing in them great, beautiful, or admirable, tire the eye, and

give us distaste and aversion, instead of pleasure. With some of these

situations, such as Barnes, Mortlake, etc., even the shore of Essex

might contend, not upon very unequal terms; but on the Kentish borders

there are many spots to be chosen by the builder which might justly

claim the preference over almost the very finest of those in Middlesex

and Surrey.

How shall we account for this depravity in taste? for surely there are

none so very mean and contemptible as to bring the pleasure of seeing

a number of little wherries, gliding along after one another, in

competition with what we enjoy in viewing a succession of ships, with

all their sails expanded to the winds, bounding over the waves before

us.

And here I cannot pass by another observation on the deplorable want of

taste in our enjoyments, which we show by almost totally neglecting the

pursuit of what seems to me the highest degree of amusement; this is,

the sailing ourselves in little vessels of our own, contrived only for

our ease and accommodation, to which such situations of our villas as I

have recommended would be so convenient, and even necessary.

This amusement, I confess, if enjoyed in any perfection, would be of

the expensive kind; but such expense would not exceed the reach of a

moderate fortune, and would fall very short of the prices which are

daily paid for pleasures of a far inferior rate.

The truth, I believe, is, that sailing in the manner I have just

mentioned is a pleasure rather unknown, or unthought of, than rejected

by those who have experienced it; unless, perhaps, the apprehension of

danger or seasickness may be supposed, by the timorous and delicate,

to make too large deductions--insisting that all their enjoyments shall

come to them pure and unmixed, and being ever ready to cry out,

----Nocet empta dolore voluptas.

This, however, was my present case; for the ease and lightness which I

felt from my tapping, the gayety of the morning, the pleasant sailing

with wind and tide, and the many agreeable objects with which I was

constantly entertained during the whole way, were all suppressed and

overcome by the single consideration of my wife's pain, which continued

incessantly to torment her till we came to an anchor, when I dispatched

a messenger in great haste for the best reputed operator in Gravesend.

A surgeon of some eminence now appeared, who did not decline

tooth-drawing, though he certainly would have been offended with the

appellation of tooth-drawer no less than his brethren, the members

of that venerable body, would be with that of barber, since the late

separation between those long-united companies, by which, if the

surgeons have gained much, the barbers are supposed to have lost very

little. This able and careful person (for so I sincerely believe he is)

after examining the guilty tooth, declared that it was such a rotten

shell, and so placed at the very remotest end of the upper jaw, where it

was in a manner covered and secured by a large fine firm tooth, that he

despaired of his power of drawing it.

He said, indeed, more to my wife, and used more rhetoric to dissuade

her from having it drawn, than is generally employed to persuade

young ladies to prefer a pain of three moments to one of three months'

continuance, especially if those young ladies happen to be past forty

and fifty years of age, when, by submitting to support a racking

torment, the only good circumstance attending which is, it is so short

that scarce one in a thousand can cry out "I feel it," they are to do a

violence to their charms, and lose one of those beautiful holders with

which alone Sir Courtly Nice declares a lady can ever lay hold of his

heart. He said at last so much, and seemed to reason so justly, that I

came over to his side, and assisted him in prevailing on my wife (for it

was no easy matter) to resolve on keeping her tooth a little longer, and

to apply palliatives only for relief. These were opium applied to the

tooth, and blisters behind the ears.

Whilst we were at dinner this day in the cabin, on a sudden the window

on one side was beat into the room with a crash as if a twenty-pounder

had been discharged among us. We were all alarmed at the suddenness of

the accident, for which, however, we were soon able to account, for the

sash, which was shivered all to pieces, was pursued into the middle

of the cabin by the bowsprit of a little ship called a cod-smack, the

master of which made us amends for running (carelessly at best) against

us, and injuring the ship, in the sea-way; that is to say, by damning us

all to hell, and uttering several pious wishes that it had done us much

more mischief. All which were answered in their own kind and phrase

by our men, between whom and the other crew a dialogue of oaths and

scurrility was carried on as long as they continued in each other's

hearing.

It is difficult, I think, to assign a satisfactory reason why sailors in

general should, of all others, think themselves entirely discharged from

the common bands of humanity, and should seem to glory in the language

and behavior of savages! They see more of the world, and have, most of

them, a more erudite education than is the portion of landmen of their

degree. Nor do I believe that in any country they visit (Holland itself

not excepted) they can ever find a parallel to what daily passes on

the river Thames. Is it that they think true courage (for they are the

bravest fellows upon earth) inconsistent with all the gentleness of

a humane carriage, and that the contempt of civil order springs up

in minds but little cultivated, at the same time and from the same

principles with the contempt of danger and death? Is it--? in short, it

is so; and how it comes to be so I leave to form a question in the Robin

Hood Society, or to be propounded for solution among the enigmas in the

Woman's Almanac for the next year.

Monday, July 1.--This day Mr. Welch took his leave of me after dinner,

as did a young lady of her sister, who was proceeding with my wife to

Lisbon. They both set out together in a post-chaise for London. Soon

after their departure our cabin, where my wife and I were sitting

together, was visited by two ruffians, whose appearance greatly

corresponded with that of the sheriffs, or rather the knight-marshal's

bailiffs. One of these especially, who seemed to affect a more than

ordinary degree of rudeness and insolence, came in without any kind of

ceremony, with a broad gold lace on his hat, which was cocked with much

military fierceness on his head. An inkhorn at his buttonhole and some

papers in his hand sufficiently assured me what he was, and I asked him

if he and his companion were not custom-house officers: he answered with

sufficient dignity that they were, as an information which he seemed

to conclude would strike the hearer with awe, and suppress all further

inquiry; but, on the contrary, I proceeded to ask of what rank he was

in the custom-house, and, receiving an answer from his companion, as I

remember, that the gentleman was a riding surveyor, I replied that he

might be a riding surveyor, but could be no gentleman, for that none who

had any title to that denomination would break into the presence of

a lady without an apology or even moving his hat. He then took his

covering from his head and laid it on the table, saying, he asked

pardon, and blamed the mate, who should, he said, have informed him if

any persons of distinction were below. I told him he might guess by our

appearance (which, perhaps, was rather more than could be said with the

strictest adherence to truth) that he was before a gentleman and lady,

which should teach him to be very civil in his behavior, though we

should not happen to be of that number whom the world calls people of

fashion and distinction. However, I said, that as he seemed sensible of

his error, and had asked pardon, the lady would permit him to put

his hat on again if he chose it. This he refused with some degree of

surliness, and failed not to convince me that, if I should condescend

to become more gentle, he would soon grow more rude. I now renewed a

reflection, which I have often seen occasion to make, that there is

nothing so incongruous in nature as any kind of power with lowness of

mind and of ability, and that there is nothing more deplorable than

the want of truth in the whimsical notion of Plato, who tells us that

"Saturn, well knowing the state of human affairs, gave us kings and

rulers, not of human but divine original; for, as we make not shepherds

of sheep, nor oxherds of oxen, nor goatherds of goats, but place some of

our own kind over all as being better and fitter to govern them; in

the same manner were demons by the divine love set over us as a race

of beings of a superior order to men, and who, with great ease to

themselves, might regulate our affairs and establish peace, modesty,

freedom, and justice, and, totally destroying all sedition, might

complete the happiness of the human race. So far, at least, may even now

be said with truth, that in all states which are under the government of

mere man, without any divine assistance, there is nothing but labor and

misery to be found. From what I have said, therefore, we may at least

learn, with our utmost endeavors, to imitate the Saturnian institution;

borrowing all assistance from our immortal part, while we pay to this

the strictest obedience, we should form both our private economy and

public policy from its dictates. By this dispensation of our immortal

minds we are to establish a law and to call it by that name. But if any

government be in the hands of a single person, of the few, or of the

many, and such governor or governors shall abandon himself or themselves

to the unbridled pursuit of the wildest pleasures or desires, unable to

restrain any passion, but possessed with an insatiable bad disease; if

such shall attempt to govern, and at the same time to trample on all

laws, there can be no means of preservation left for the wretched

people." Plato de Leg., lib. iv. p. 713, c. 714, edit. Serrani.

It is true that Plato is here treating of the highest or sovereign power

in a state, but it is as true that his observations are general and may

be applied to all inferior powers; and, indeed, every subordinate degree

is immediately derived from the highest; and, as it is equally protected

by the same force and sanctified by the same authority, is alike

dangerous to the well-being of the subject. Of all powers, perhaps,

there is none so sanctified and protected as this which is under

our present consideration. So numerous, indeed, and strong, are the

sanctions given to it by many acts of parliament, that, having once

established the laws of customs on merchandise, it seems to have been

the sole view of the legislature to strengthen the hands and to protect

the persons of the officers who became established by those laws,

many of whom are so far from bearing any resemblance to the Saturnian

institution, and to be chosen from a degree of beings superior to the

rest of human race, that they sometimes seem industriously picked out of

the lowest and vilest orders of mankind. There is, indeed, nothing, so

useful to man in general, nor so beneficial to particular societies and

individuals, as trade. This is that alma mater at whose plentiful breast

all mankind are nourished. It is true, like other parents, she is not

always equally indulgent to all her children, but, though she gives to

her favorites a vast proportion of redundancy and superfluity, there are

very few whom she refuses to supply with the conveniences, and none with

the necessaries, of life.

Such a benefactress as this must naturally be beloved by mankind in

general; it would be wonderful, therefore, if her interest was not

considered by them, and protected from the fraud and violence of some

of her rebellious offspring, who, coveting more than their share or more

than she thinks proper to allow them, are daily employed in meditating

mischief against her, and in endeavoring to steal from their brethren

those shares which this great alma mater had allowed them.

At length our governor came on board, and about six in the evening

we weighed anchor, and fell down to the Nore, whither our passage was

extremely pleasant, the evening being very delightful, the moon just

past the full, and both wind and tide favorable to us.

Tuesday, July 2.--This morning we again set sail, under all the

advantages we had enjoyed the evening before. This day we left the

shore of Essex and coasted along Kent, passing by the pleasant island of

Thanet, which is an island, and that of Sheppy, which is not an island,

and about three o 'clock, the wind being now full in our teeth, we came

to an anchor in the Downs, within two miles of Deal.--My wife, having

suffered intolerable pain from her tooth, again renewed her resolution

of having it drawn, and another surgeon was sent for from Deal, but with

no better success than the former. He likewise declined the operation,

for the same reason which had been assigned by the former: however, such

was her resolution, backed with pain, that he was obliged to make the

attempt, which concluded more in honor of his judgment than of his

operation; for, after having put my poor wife to inexpressible torment,

he was obliged to leave her tooth in statu quo; and she had now the

comfortable prospect of a long fit of pain, which might have lasted

her whole voyage, without any possibility of relief. In these pleasing

sensations, of which I had my just share, nature, overcome with fatigue,

about eight in the evening resigned her to rest--a circumstance which

would have given me some happiness, could I have known how to employ

those spirits which were raised by it; but, unfortunately for me, I

was left in a disposition of enjoying an agreeable hour without the

assistance of a companion, which has always appeared to me necessary to

such enjoyment; my daughter and her companion were both retired sea-sick

to bed; the other passengers were a rude school-boy of fourteen years

old and an illiterate Portuguese friar, who understood no language but

his own, in which I had not the least smattering. The captain was the

only person left in whose conversation I might indulge myself; but

unluckily, besides a total ignorance of everything in the world but a

ship, he had the misfortune of being so deaf, that to make him hear, I

will not say understand, my words, I must run the risk of conveying them

to the ears of my wife, who, though in another room (called, I think,

the state-room--being, indeed, a most stately apartment, capable of

containing one human body in length, if not very tall, and three bodies

in breadth), lay asleep within a yard of me. In this situation necessity

and choice were one and the same thing; the captain and I sat down

together to a small bowl of punch, over which we both soon fell fast

asleep, and so concluded the evening.

Wednesday, July 3.--This morning I awaked at four o'clock for my

distemper seldom suffered me to sleep later. I presently got up, and had

the pleasure of enjoying the sight of a tempestuous sea for four hours

before the captain was stirring; for he loved to indulge himself in

morning slumbers, which were attended with a wind-music, much more

agreeable to the performers than to the hearers, especially such as

have, as I had, the privilege of sitting in the orchestra. At eight o

'clock the captain rose, and sent his boat on shore. I ordered my

man likewise to go in it, as my distemper was not of that kind which

entirely deprives us of appetite. Now, though the captain had well

victualled his ship with all manner of salt provisions for the voyage,

and had added great quantities of fresh stores, particularly of

vegetables, at Gravesend, such as beans and peas, which had been on

board only two days, and had possibly not been gathered above two more,

I apprehended I could provide better for myself at Deal than the ship's

ordinary seemed to promise. I accordingly sent for fresh provisions of

all kinds from the shore, in order to put off the evil day of starving

as long as possible. My man returned with most of the articles I sent

for, and I now thought myself in a condition of living a week on my own

provisions. I therefore ordered my own dinner, which I wanted nothing

but a cook to dress and a proper fire to dress it at; but those were

not to be had, nor indeed any addition to my roast mutton, except the

pleasure of the captain's company, with that of the other passengers;

for my wife continued the whole day in a state of dozing, and my other

females, whose sickness did not abate by the rolling of the ship at

anchor, seemed more inclined to empty their stomachs than to fill them.

Thus I passed the whole day (except about an hour at dinner) by myself,

and the evening concluded with the captain as the preceding one had

done; one comfortable piece of news he communicated to me, which was,

that he had no doubt of a prosperous wind in the morning; but as he did

not divulge the reasons of this confidence, and as I saw none myself

besides the wind being directly opposite, my faith in this prophecy was

not strong enough to build any great hopes upon.

Thursday, July 4.--This morning, however, the captain seemed resolved

to fulfill his own predictions, whether the wind would or no; he

accordingly weighed anchor, and, taking the advantage of the tide when

the wind was not very boisterous, he hoisted his sails; and, as if his

power had been no less absolute over Aeolus than it was over Neptune, he

forced the wind to blow him on in its own despite.

But as all men who have ever been at sea well know how weak such

attempts are, and want no authorities of Scripture to prove that the

most absolute power of a captain of a ship is very contemptible in the

wind's eye, so did it befall our noble commander, who, having struggled

with the wind three or four hours, was obliged to give over, and lost

in a few minutes all that he had been so long a-gaining; in short,

we returned to our former station, and once more cast anchor in the

neighborhood of Deal.

Here, though we lay near the shore, that we might promise ourselves

all the emolument which could be derived from it, we found ourselves

deceived; and that we might with as much conveniency be out of the sight

of land; for, except when the captain launched forth his own boat, which

he did always with great reluctance, we were incapable of procuring

anything from Deal, but at a price too exorbitant, and beyond the reach

even of modern luxury--the fare of a boat from Deal, which lay at two

miles' distance, being at least three half-crowns, and, if we had been

in any distress for it, as many half-guineas; for these good people

consider the sea as a large common appendant to their manor; in which

when they find any of their fellow-creatures impounded, they conclude

that they have a full right of making them pay at their own discretion

for their deliverance: to say the truth, whether it be that men who live

on the sea-shore are of an amphibious kind, and do not entirely partake

of human nature, or whatever else may be the reason, they are so far

from taking any share in the distresses of mankind, or of being moved

with any compassion for them, that they look upon them as blessings

showered down from above, and which the more they improve to their

own use, the greater is their gratitude and piety. Thus at Gravesend

a sculler requires a shilling for going less way than he would row in

London for threepence; and at Deal a boat often brings more profit in a

day than it can produce in London in a week, or perhaps in a month; in

both places the owner of the boat founds his demand on the necessity

and distress of one who stands more or less in absolute want of

his assistance, and with the urgency of these always rises in the

exorbitancy of his demand, without ever considering that, from these

very circumstances, the power or ease of gratifying such demand is in

like proportion lessened. Now, as I am unwilling that some conclusions,

which may be, I am aware, too justly drawn from these observations,

should be imputed to human nature in general, I have endeavored to

account for them in a way more consistent with the goodness and dignity

of that nature. However it be, it seems a little to reflect on the

governors of such monsters that they do not take some means to restrain

these impositions, and prevent them from triumphing any longer in

the miseries of those who are, in many circumstances at least, their

fellow-creatures, and considering the distresses of a wretched seaman,

from his being wrecked to his being barely windbound, as a blessing sent

among them from above, and calling it by that blasphemous name.

Friday, July 5.--This day I sent a servant on board a man-of-war that

was stationed here, with my compliments to the captain, to represent to

him the distress of the ladies, and to desire the favor of his long-boat

to conduct us to Dover, at about seven miles' distance; and at the same

time presumed to make use of a great lady's name, the wife of the first

lord commissioner of the admiralty, who would, I told him, be pleased

with any kindness shown by him towards us in our miserable condition.

And this I am convinced was true, from the humanity of the lady, though

she was entirely unknown to me.

The captain returned a verbal answer to a long letter acquainting me

that what I desired could not be complied with, it being a favor not in

his power to grant. This might be, and I suppose was, true; but it is

as true that, if he was able to write, and had pen, ink, and paper on

board, he might have sent a written answer, and that it was the part of

a gentleman so to have done; but this is a character seldom maintained

on the watery element, especially by those who exercise any power on it.

Every commander of a vessel here seems to think himself entirely free

from all those rules of decency and civility which direct and restrain

the conduct of the members of a society on shore; and each, claiming

absolute dominion in his little wooden world, rules by his own laws and

his own discretion. I do not, indeed, know so pregnant an instance

of the dangerous consequences of absolute power, and its aptness to

intoxicate the mind, as that of those petty tyrants, who become such in

a moment, from very well-disposed and social members of that communion

in which they affect no superiority, but live in an orderly state of

legal subjection with their fellow-citizens.

Saturday, July 6.--This morning our commander, declaring he was sure the

wind would change, took the advantage of an ebbing tide, and weighed

his anchor. His assurance, however, had the same completion, and his

endeavors the same success, with his formal trial; and he was soon

obliged to return once more to his old quarters. Just before we let go

our anchor, a small sloop, rather than submit to yield us an inch of

way, ran foul of our ship, and carried off her bowsprit. This obstinate

frolic would have cost those aboard the sloop very dear, if our

steersman had not been too generous to exert his superiority, the

certain consequence of which would have been the immediate sinking

of the other. This contention of the inferior with a might capable of

crushing it in an instant may seem to argue no small share of folly

or madness, as well as of impudence; but I am convinced there is very

little danger in it: contempt is a port to which the pride of man

submits to fly with reluctance, but those who are within it are always

in a place of the most assured security; for whosoever throws away his

sword prefers, indeed, a less honorable but much safer means of avoiding

danger than he who defends himself with it. And here we shall offer

another distinction, of the truth of which much reading and experience

have well convinced us, that as in the most absolute governments there

is a regular progression of slavery downwards, from the top to the

bottom, the mischief of which is seldom felt with any great force and

bitterness but by the next immediate degree; so in the most dissolute

and anarchical states there is as regular an ascent of what is called

rank or condition, which is always laying hold of the head of him who is

advanced but one step higher on the ladder, who might, if he did not too

much despise such efforts, kick his pursuer headlong to the bottom. We

will conclude this digression with one general and short observation,

which will, perhaps, set the whole matter in a clearer light than the

longest and most labored harangue. Whereas envy of all things most

exposes us to danger from others, so contempt of all things best secures

us from them. And thus, while the dung-cart and the sloop are always

meditating mischief against the coach and the ship, and throwing

themselves designedly in their way, the latter consider only their own

security, and are not ashamed to break the road and let the other pass

by them.

Monday, July 8.--Having passed our Sunday without anything remarkable,

unless the catching a great number of whitings in the afternoon may

be thought so, we now set sail on Monday at six o'clock, with a little

variation of wind; but this was so very little, and the breeze itself so

small, but the tide was our best and indeed almost our only friend. This

conducted us along the short remainder of the Kentish shore. Here

we passed that cliff of Dover which makes so tremendous a figure

in Shakespeare, and which whoever reads without being giddy, must,

according to Mr. Addison's observation, have either a very good head or

a very bad, one; but which, whoever contracts any such ideas from the

sight of, must have at least a poetic if not a Shakesperian genius.

In truth, mountains, rivers, heroes, and gods owe great part of their

existence to the poets; and Greece and Italy do so plentifully abound

in the former, because they furnish so glorious a number of the latter;

who, while they bestowed immortality on every little hillock and blind

stream, left the noblest rivers and mountains in the world to share the

same obscurity with the eastern and western poets, in which they

are celebrated. This evening we beat the sea of Sussex in sight of

Dungeness, with much more pleasure than progress; for the weather was

almost a perfect calm, and the moon, which was almost at the full,

scarce suffered a single cloud to veil her from our sight.

Tuesday, Wednesday, July 9, 10.--These two days we had much the same

fine weather, and made much the same way; but in the evening of the

latter day a pretty fresh gale sprung up at N.N.W., which brought us by

the morning in sight of the Isle of Wight.

Thursday, July 11.--This gale continued till towards noon; when the east

end of the island bore but little ahead of us. The captain swaggered and

declared he would keep the sea; but the wind got the better of him, so

that about three he gave up the victory, and making a sudden tack stood

in for the shore, passed by Spithead and Portsmouth, and came to an

anchor at a place called Ryde on the island.

A most tragical incident fell out this day at sea. While the ship was

under sail, but making as will appear no great way, a kitten, one of

four of the feline inhabitants of the cabin, fell from the window into

the water: an alarm was immediately given to the captain, who was then

upon deck, and received it with the utmost concern and many bitter

oaths. He immediately gave orders to the steersman in favor of the poor

thing, as he called it; the sails were instantly slackened, and all

hands, as the phrase is, employed to recover the poor animal. I was,

I own, extremely surprised at all this; less indeed at the captain's

extreme tenderness than at his conceiving any possibility of success;

for if puss had had nine thousand instead of nine lives, I concluded

they had been all lost. The boatswain, however, had more sanguine hopes,

for, having stripped himself of his jacket, breeches, and shirt, he

leaped boldly into the water, and to my great astonishment in a few

minutes returned to the ship, bearing the motionless animal in his

mouth. Nor was this, I observed, a matter of such great difficulty as

it appeared to my ignorance, and possibly may seem to that of my

fresh-water reader. The kitten was now exposed to air and sun on the

deck, where its life, of which it retained no symptoms, was despaired of

by all.

The captain's humanity, if I may so call it, did not so totally destroy

his philosophy as to make him yield himself up to affliction on this

melancholy occasion. Having felt his loss like a man, he resolved to

show he could bear it like one; and, having declared he had rather have

lost a cask of rum or brandy, betook himself to threshing at backgammon

with the Portuguese friar, in which innocent amusement they had passed

about two-thirds of their time.

But as I have, perhaps, a little too wantonly endeavored to raise the

tender passions of my readers in this narrative, I should think myself

unpardonable if I concluded it without giving them the satisfaction of

hearing that the kitten at last recovered, to the great joy of the good

captain, but to the great disappointment of some of the sailors, who

asserted that the drowning a cat was the very surest way of raising a

favorable wind; a supposition of which, though we have heard several

plausible accounts, we will not presume to assign the true original

reason.

Friday, July 12.--This day our ladies went ashore at Ryde, and drank

their afternoon tea at an ale-house there with great satisfaction: here

they were regaled with fresh cream, to which they had been strangers

since they left the Downs.

Saturday, July 13.--The wind seeming likely to continue in the same

corner where it had been almost constantly for two months together, I

was persuaded by my wife to go ashore and stay at Ryde till we sailed.

I approved the motion much; for though I am a great lover of the sea,

I now fancied there was more pleasure in breathing the fresh air of the

land; but how to get thither was the question; for, being really that

dead luggage which I considered all passengers to be in the beginning

of this narrative, and incapable of any bodily motion without external

impulse, it was in vain to leave the ship, or to determine to do it,

without the assistance of others. In one instance, perhaps, the living,

luggage is more difficult to be moved or removed than an equal or much

superior weight of dead matter; which, if of the brittle kind, may

indeed be liable to be broken through negligence; but this, by proper

care, may be almost certainly prevented; whereas the fractures to which

the living lumps are exposed are sometimes by no caution avoidable, and

often by no art to be amended.

I was deliberating on the means of conveyance, not so much out of the

ship to the boat as out of a little tottering boat to the land; a matter

which, as I had already experienced in the Thames, was not extremely

easy, when to be performed by any other limbs than your own. Whilst I

weighed all that could suggest itself on this head, without strictly

examining the merit of the several schemes which were advanced by the

captain and sailors, and, indeed, giving no very deep attention even to

my wife, who, as well as her friend and my daughter, were exerting their

tender concern for my ease and safety, Fortune, for I am convinced she

had a hand in it, sent me a present of a buck; a present welcome enough

of itself, but more welcome on account of the vessel in which it came,

being a large hoy, which in some places would pass for a ship, and many

people would go some miles to see the sight.

I was pretty easily conveyed on board this hoy; but to get from hence

to the shore was not so easy a task; for, however strange it may appear,

the water itself did not extend so far; an instance which seems to

explain those lines of Ovid,

Omnia pontus erant, deerant quoque littora ponto,

in a less tautological sense than hath generally been imputed to them.

In fact, between the sea and the shore there was, at low water, an

impassable gulf, if I may so call it, of deep mud, which could neither

be traversed by walking nor swimming; so that for near one half of the

twenty-four hours Ryde was inaccessible by friend or foe. But as the

magistrates of this place seemed more to desire the company of the

former than to fear that of the latter, they had begun to make a small

causeway to the low-water mark, so that foot passengers might land

whenever they pleased; but as this work was of a public kind, and

would have cost a large sum of money, at least ten pounds, and

the magistrates, that is to say, the churchwardens, the overseers,

constable, and tithingman, and the principal inhabitants, had every

one of them some separate scheme of private interest to advance at the

expense of the public, they fell out among themselves; and, after having

thrown away one half of the requisite sum, resolved at least to save the

other half, and rather be contented to sit down losers themselves than

to enjoy any benefit which might bring in a greater profit to another.

Thus that unanimity which is so necessary in all public affairs became

wanting, and every man, from the fear of being a bubble to another, was,

in reality, a bubble to himself.

However, as there is scarce any difficulty to which the strength of men,

assisted with the cunning of art, is not equal, I was at last hoisted

into a small boat, and being rowed pretty near the shore, was taken up

by two sailors, who waded with me through the mud, and placed me in a

chair on the land, whence they afterwards conveyed me a quarter of a

mile farther, and brought me to a house which seemed to bid the fairest

for hospitality of any in Ryde.

We brought with us our provisions from the ship, so that we wanted

nothing but a fire to dress our dinner, and a room in which we might eat

it. In neither of these had we any reason to apprehend a disappointment,

our dinner consisting only of beans and bacon; and the worst apartment

in his majesty's dominions, either at home or abroad, being fully

sufficient to answer our present ideas of delicacy.

Unluckily, however, we were disappointed in both; for when we arrived

about four at our inn, exulting in the hopes of immediately seeing our

beans smoking on the table, we had the mortification of seeing them on

the table indeed, but without that circumstance which would have made

the sight agreeable, being in the same state in which we had dispatched

them from our ship. In excuse for this delay, though we had exceeded,

almost purposely, the time appointed, and our provision had arrived

three hours before, the mistress of the house acquainted us that it was

not for want of time to dress them that they were not ready, but for

fear of their being cold or over-done before we should come; which she

assured us was much worse than waiting a few minutes for our dinner; an

observation so very just, that it is impossible to find any objection

in it; but, indeed, it was not altogether so proper at this time, for we

had given the most absolute orders to have them ready at four, and

had been ourselves, not without much care and difficulty, most

exactly punctual in keeping to the very minute of our appointment.

But tradesmen, inn-keepers, and servants, never care to indulge us in

matters contrary to our true interest, which they always know better

than ourselves; nor can any bribes corrupt them to go out of their way

while they are consulting our good in our own despite.

Our disappointment in the other particular, in defiance of our humility,

as it was more extraordinary, was more provoking. In short, Mrs.

Francis (for that was the name of the good woman of the house) no sooner

received the news of our intended arrival than she considered more the

gentility than the humanity of her guests, and applied herself not to

that which kindles but to that which extinguishes fire, and, forgetting

to put on her pot, fell to washing her house.

As the messenger who had brought my venison was impatient to be

dispatched, I ordered it to be brought and laid on the table in the room

where I was seated; and the table not being large enough, one side, and

that a very bloody one, was laid on the brick floor. I then ordered Mrs.

Francis to be called in, in order to give her instructions concerning

it; in particular, what I would have roasted and what baked; concluding

that she would be highly pleased with the prospect of so much money

being spent in her house as she might have now reason to expect, if

the wind continued only a few days longer to blow from the same points

whence it had blown for several weeks past.

I soon saw good cause, I must confess, to despise my own sagacity. Mrs.

Francis, having received her orders, without making any answer, snatched

the side from the floor, which remained stained with blood, and, bidding

a servant to take up that on the table, left the room with no pleasant

countenance, muttering to herself that, "had she known the litter which

was to have been made, she would not have taken such pains to wash her

house that morning. If this was gentility, much good may it do such

gentlefolks; for her part she had no notion of it." From these murmurs

I received two hints. The one, that it was not from a mistake of

our inclination that the good woman had starved us, but from wisely

consulting her own dignity, or rather perhaps her vanity, to which our

hunger was offered up as a sacrifice. The other, that I was now sitting

in a damp room, a circumstance, though it had hitherto escaped my notice

from the color of the bricks, which was by no means to be neglected in a

valetudinary state.

My wife, who, besides discharging excellently well her own and all

the tender offices becoming the female character; who, besides being

a faithful friend, an amiable companion, and a tender nurse, could

likewise supply the wants of a decrepit husband, and occasionally

perform his part, had, before this, discovered the immoderate attention

to neatness in Mrs. Francis, and provided against its ill consequences.

She had found, though not under the same roof, a very snug apartment

belonging to Mr. Francis, and which had escaped the mop by his wife's

being satisfied it could not possibly be visited by gentle-folks. This

was a dry, warm, oaken-floored barn, lined on both sides with wheaten

straw, and opening at one end into a green field and a beautiful

prospect. Here, without hesitation, she ordered the cloth to be laid,

and came hastily to snatch me from worse perils by water than the common

dangers of the sea.

Mrs. Francis, who could not trust her own ears, or could not believe a

footman in so extraordinary a phenomenon, followed my wife, and asked

her if she had indeed ordered the cloth to be laid in the barn? She

answered in the affirmative; upon which Mrs. Francis declared she would

not dispute her pleasure, but it was the first time she believed that

quality had ever preferred a barn to a house. She showed at the same

time the most pregnant marks of contempt, and again lamented the labor

she had undergone, through her ignorance of the absurd taste of her

guests.

At length we were seated in one of the most pleasant spots I believe in

the kingdom, and were regaled with our beans and bacon, in which there

was nothing deficient but the quantity. This defect was however so

deplorable that we had consumed our whole dish before we had visibly

lessened our hunger. We now waited with impatience the arrival of our

second course, which necessity, and not luxury, had dictated. This was

a joint of mutton which Mrs. Francis had been ordered to provide; but

when, being tired with expectation, we ordered our servants TO SEE FOR

SOMETHING ELSE, we were informed that there was nothing else; on which

Mrs. Francis, being summoned, declared there was no such thing as mutton

to be had at Ryde. When I expressed some astonishment at their having no

butcher in a village so situated, she answered they had a very good one,

and one that killed all sorts of meat in season, beef two or three times

a year, and mutton the whole year round; but that, it being then beans

and peas time, he killed no meat, by reason he was not sure of selling

it. This she had not thought worthy of communication, any more than that

there lived a fisherman at next door, who was then provided with plenty

of soles, and whitings, and lobsters, far superior to those which adorn

a city feast. This discovery being made by accident, we completed the

best, the pleasantest, and the merriest meal, with more appetite,

more real solid luxury, and more festivity, than was ever seen in an

entertainment at White's.

It may be wondered at, perhaps, that Mrs. Francis should be so negligent

of providing for her guests, as she may seem to be thus inattentive

to her own interest; but this was not the case; for, having clapped a

poll-tax on our heads at our arrival, and determined at what price to

discharge our bodies from her house, the less she suffered any other to

share in the levy the clearer it came into her own pocket; and that

it was better to get twelve pence in a shilling than ten pence, which

latter would be the case if she afforded us fish at any rate.

Thus we passed a most agreeable day owing to good appetites and good

humor; two hearty feeders which will devour with satisfaction whatever

food you place before them; whereas, without these, the elegance of St.

James's, the charde, the perigord-pie, or the ortolan, the venison, the

turtle, or the custard, may titillate the throat, but will never convey

happiness to the heart or cheerfulness to the countenance.

As the wind appeared still immovable, my wife proposed my lying on

shore. I presently agreed, though in defiance of an act of parliament,

by which persons wandering abroad and lodging in ale-houses are

decreed to be rogues and vagabonds; and this too after having been very

singularly officious in putting that law in execution. My wife, having

reconnoitered the house, reported that there was one room in which

were two beds. It was concluded, therefore, that she and Harriot should

occupy one and myself take possession of the other. She added likewise

an ingenious recommendation of this room to one who had so long been in

a cabin, which it exactly resembled, as it was sunk down with age on one

side, and was in the form of a ship with gunwales too.

For my own part, I make little doubt but this apartment was an ancient

temple, built with the materials of a wreck, and probably dedicated to

Neptune in honor of THE BLESSING sent by him to the inhabitants; such

blessings having in all ages been very common to them. The timber

employed in it confirms this opinion, being such as is seldom used by

ally but ship-builders. I do not find indeed any mention of this matter

in Hearn; but perhaps its antiquity was too modern to deserve his

notice. Certain it is that this island of Wight was not an early convert

to Christianity; nay, there is some reason to doubt whether it was ever

entirely converted. But I have only time to touch slightly on things

of this kind, which, luckily for us, we have a society whose peculiar

profession it is to discuss and develop.

Sunday, July 19.--This morning early I summoned Mrs. Francis, in order

to pay her the preceding day's account. As I could recollect only two

or three articles I thought there was no necessity of pen and ink. In

a single instance only we had exceeded what the law allows gratis to a

foot-soldier on his march, viz., vinegar, salt, etc., and dressing his

meat. I found, however, I was mistaken in my calculation; for when the

good woman attended with her bill it contained as follows:--

L. s. d.

Bread and beer 0 2 4

Wind 0 2 0

Rum 0 2 0

Dressing dinner 0 3 0

Tea 0 1 6

Firing 0 1 0

Lodging 0 1 6

Servants' lodging 0 0 6

-----------------

L 0 13 10

Now that five people and two servants should live a day and night at a

public-house for so small a sum will appear incredible to any person in

London above the degree of a chimney-sweeper; but more astonishing will

it seem that these people should remain so long at such a house without

tasting any other delicacy than bread, small beer, a teacupful of

milk called cream, a glass of rum converted into punch by their own

materials, and one bottle of wind, of which we only tasted a single

glass though possibly, indeed, our servants drank the remainder of the

bottle.

This wind is a liquor of English manufacture, and its flavor is thought

very delicious by the generality of the English, who drink it in great

quantities. Every seventh year is thought to produce as much as the

other six. It is then drank so plentifully that the whole nation are

in a manner intoxicated by it; and consequently very little business is

carried on at that season. It resembles in color the red wine which is

imported from Portugal, as it doth in its intoxicating quality; hence,

and from this agreement in the orthography, the one is often confounded

with the other, though both are seldom esteemed by the same person. It

is to be had in every parish of the kingdom, and a pretty large quantity

is consumed in the metropolis, where several taverns are set apart

solely for the vendition of this liquor, the masters never dealing

in any other. The disagreement in our computation produced some small

remonstrance to Mrs. Francis on my side; but this received an immediate

answer: "She scorned to overcharge gentlemen; her house had been always

frequented by the very best gentry of the island; and she had never had

a bill found fault with in her life, though she had lived upwards of

forty years in the house, and within that time the greatest gentry in

Hampshire had been at it; and that lawyer Willis never went to any

other when he came to those parts. That for her part she did not get her

livelihood by travelers, who were gone and away, and she never expected

to see them more, but that her neighbors might come again; wherefore, to

be sure, they had the only right to complain."

She was proceeding thus, and from her volubility of tongue seemed likely

to stretch the discourse to an immoderate length, when I suddenly cut

all short by paying the bill.

This morning our ladies went to church, more, I fear, from curiosity

than religion; they were attended by the captain in a most military

attire, with his cockade in his hat and his sword by his side. So

unusual an appearance in this little chapel drew the attention of all

present, and probably disconcerted the women, who were in dishabille,

and wished themselves dressed, for the sake of the curate, who was the

greatest of their beholders. While I was left alone I received a visit

from Mr. Francis himself, who was much more considerable as a farmer

than as an inn-holder. Indeed, he left the latter entirely to the care

of his wife, and he acted wisely, I believe, in so doing. As nothing

more remarkable passed on this day I will close it with the account of

these two characters, as far as a few days' residence could inform me of

them. If they should appear as new to the reader as they did to me, he

will not be displeased at finding them here. This amiable couple seemed

to border hard on their grand climacteric; nor indeed were they shy of

owning enough to fix their ages within a year or two of that time. They

appeared to be rather proud of having employed their time well than

ashamed of having lived so long; the only reason which I could ever

assign why some fine ladies, and fine gentlemen too, should desire to

be thought younger than they really are by the contemporaries of their

grandchildren. Some, indeed, who too hastily credit appearances, might

doubt whether they had made so good a use of their time as I would

insinuate, since there was no appearance of anything but poverty, want,

and wretchedness, about their house; nor could they produce anything

to a customer in exchange for his money but a few bottles of wind, and

spirituous liquors, and some very bad ale, to drink; with rusty bacon

and worse cheese to eat. But then it should be considered, on the other

side, that whatever they received was almost as entirely clear profit as

the blessing of a wreck itself; such an inn being the very reverse of a

coffee-house; for here you can neither sit for nothing nor have anything

for your money.

Again, as many marks of want abounded everywhere, so were the marks of

antiquity visible. Scarce anything was to be seen which had not some

scar upon it, made by the hand of Time; not an utensil, it was manifest,

had been purchased within a dozen years last past; so that whatever

money had come into the house during that period at least must have

remained in it, unless it had been sent abroad for food, or other

perishable commodities; but these were supplied by a small portion of

the fruits of the farm, in which the farmer allowed he had a very good

bargain. In fact, it is inconceivable what sums may be collected by

starving only, and how easy it is for a man to die rich if he will but

be contented to live miserable.

Nor is there in this kind of starving anything so terrible as some

apprehend. It neither wastes a man's flesh nor robs him of his

cheerfulness. The famous Cornaro's case well proves the contrary; and so

did farmer Francis, who was of a round stature, had a plump, round face,

with a kind of smile on it, and seemed to borrow an air of wretchedness

rather from his coat's age than from his own.

The truth is, there is a certain diet which emaciates men more than any

possible degree of abstinence; though I do not remember to have seen any

caution against it, either in Cheney, Arbuthnot, or in any other modern

writer or regimen.

Nay, the very name is not, I believe, in the learned Dr. James's

Dictionary; all which is the more extraordinary as it is a very common

food in this kingdom, and the college themselves were not long since

very liberally entertained with it by the present attorney and other

eminent lawyers in Lincoln's-inn-hall, and were all made horribly sick

by it.

But though it should not be found among our English physical writers,

we may be assured of meeting with it among the Greeks; for nothing

considerable in nature escapes their notice, though many things

considerable in them, it is to be feared, have escaped the notice of

their readers. The Greeks, then, to all such as feed too voraciously

on this diet, give the name of HEAUTOFAGI, which our physicians will, I

suppose, translate MEN THAT EAT THEMSELVES.

As nothing is so destructive to the body as this kind of food, so

nothing is so plentiful and cheap; but it was perhaps the only cheap

thing the farmer disliked. Probably living much on fish might produce

this disgust; for Diodorus Siculus attributes the same aversion in a

people of Ethiopia to the same cause; he calls them the fish-eaters,

and asserts that they cannot be brought to eat a single meal with the

Heautofagi by any persuasion, threat, or violence whatever, not even

though they should kill their children before their faces.

What hath puzzled our physicians, and prevented them from setting this

matter in the clearest light, is possibly one simple mistake, arising

from a very excusable ignorance; that the passions of men are capable of

swallowing food as well as their appetites; that the former, in feeding,

resemble the state of those animals who chew the cud; and therefore,

such men, in some sense, may be said to prey on themselves, and as it

were to devour their own entrails. And hence ensues a meager aspect and

thin habit of body, as surely as from what is called a consumption. Our

farmer was one of these. He had no more passion than an Ichthuofagus or

Ethiopian fisher. He wished not for anything, thought not of anything;

indeed, he scarce did anything or said anything. Here I cannot be

understood strictly; for then I must describe a nonentity, whereas I

would rob him of nothing but that free agency which is the cause of all

the corruption and of all the misery of human nature. No man, indeed,

ever did more than the farmer, for he was an absolute slave to labor

all the week; but in truth, as my sagacious reader must have at first

apprehended, when I said he resigned the care of the house to his wife,

I meant more than I then expressed, even the house and all that belonged

to it; for he was really a farmer only under the direction of his wife.

In a word, so composed, so serene, so placid a countenance, I never saw;

and he satisfied himself by answering to every question he was asked, "I

don't know anything about it, sir; I leaves all that to my wife."

Now, as a couple of this kind would, like two vessels of oil, have made

no composition in life, and for want of all savor must have palled every

taste; nature or fortune, or both of them, took care to provide a proper

quantity of acid in the materials that formed the wife, and to render

her a perfect helpmate for so tranquil a husband. She abounded in

whatsoever he was defective; that is to say, in almost everything. She

was indeed as vinegar to oil, or a brisk wind to a standing-pool, and

preserved all from stagnation and corruption.

Quin the player, on taking a nice and severe survey of a

fellow-comedian, burst forth into this exclamation:--"If that fellow be

not a rogue, God Almighty doth not write a legible hand."

Whether he guessed right or no is not worth my while to examine; certain

it is that the latter, having wrought his features into a proper harmony

to become the characters of Iago, Shylock, and others of the same cast,

gave us a semblance of truth to the observation that was sufficient

to confirm the wit of it. Indeed, we may remark, in favor of the

physiognomist, though the law has made him a rogue and vagabond, that

Nature is seldom curious in her works within, without employing some

little pains on the outside; and this more particularly in mischievous

characters, in forming which, as Mr. Derham observes, in venomous

insects, as the sting or saw of a wasp, she is sometimes wonderfully

industrious. Now, when she hath thus completely armed our hero to carry

on a war with man, she never fails of furnishing that innocent lambkin

with some means of knowing his enemy, and foreseeing his designs. Thus

she hath been observed to act in the case of a rattlesnake, which never

meditates a human prey without giving warning of his approach. This

observation will, I am convinced, hold most true, if applied to the

most venomous individuals of human insects. A tyrant, a trickster, and

a bully, generally wear the marks of their several dispositions in

their countenances; so do the vixen, the shrew, the scold, and all other

females of the like kind. But, perhaps, nature hath never afforded a

stronger example of all this than in the case of Mrs. Francis. She was a

short, squat woman; her head was closely joined to her shoulders, where

it was fixed somewhat awry; every feature of her countenance was

sharp and pointed; her face was furrowed with the smallpox; and her

complexion, which seemed to be able to turn milk to curds, not a little

resembled in color such milk as had already undergone that operation.

She appeared, indeed, to have many symptoms of a deep jaundice in her

look; but the strength and firmness of her voice overbalanced them all;

the tone of this was a sharp treble at a distance, for I seldom heard

it on the same floor, but was usually waked with it in the morning, and

entertained with it almost continually through the whole day.

Though vocal be usually put in opposition to instrumental music, I

question whether this might not be thought to partake of the nature of

both; for she played on two instruments, which she seemed to keep for

no other use from morning till night; these were two maids, or rather

scolding-stocks, who, I suppose, by some means or other, earned their

board, and she gave them their lodging gratis, or for no other service

than to keep her lungs in constant exercise.

She differed, as I have said, in every particular from her husband; but

very remarkably in this, that, as it was impossible to displease him, so

it was as impossible to please her; and as no art could remove a smile

from his countenance, so could no art carry it into hers. If her bills

were remonstrated against she was offended with the tacit censure of

her fair-dealing; if they were not, she seemed to regard it as a tacit

sarcasm on her folly, which might have set down larger prices with the

same success. On this lather hint she did indeed improve, for she daily

raised some of her articles. A pennyworth of fire was to-day rated at a

shilling, to-morrow at eighteen-pence; and if she dressed us two dishes

for two shillings on the Saturday, we paid half-a-crown for the cookery

of one on the Sunday; and, whenever she was paid, she never left the

room without lamenting the small amount of her bill, saying, "she knew

not how it was that others got their money by gentle-folks, but for her

part she had not the art of it." When she was asked why she complained,

when she was paid all she demanded, she answered, "she could not deny

that, nor did she know she had omitted anything; but that it was but

a poor bill for gentle-folks to pay." I accounted for all this by her

having heard, that it is a maxim with the principal inn-holders on the

continent, to levy considerable sums on their guests, who travel with

many horses and servants, though such guests should eat little or

nothing in their houses; the method being, I believe, in such cases, to

lay a capitation on the horses, and not on their masters. But she did

not consider that in most of these inns a very great degree of hunger,

without any degree of delicacy, may be satisfied; and that in all such

inns there is some appearance, at least, of provision, as well as of a

man-cook to dress it, one of the hostlers being always furnished with a

cook's cap, waistcoat, and apron, ready to attend gentlemen and ladies

on their summons; that the case therefore of such inns differed from

hers, where there was nothing to eat or to drink, and in reality no

house to inhabit, no chair to sit upon, nor any bed to lie in; that

one third or fourth part therefore of the levy imposed at inns was, in

truth, a higher tax than the whole was when laid on in the other, where,

in order to raise a small sum, a man is obliged to submit to pay as many

various ways for the same thing as he doth to the government for the

light which enters through his own window into his own house, from his

own estate; such are the articles of bread and beer, firing, eating and

dressing dinner.

The foregoing is a very imperfect sketch of this extraordinary couple;

for everything is here lowered instead of being heightened. Those who

would see them set forth in more lively colors, and with the proper

ornaments, may read the descriptions of the Furies in some of the

classical poets, or of the Stoic philosophers in the works of Lucian.

Monday, July 20.--This day nothing remarkable passed; Mrs. Francis

levied a tax of fourteen shillings for the Sunday. We regaled ourselves

at dinner with venison and good claret of our own; and in the afternoon,

the women, attended by the captain, walked to see a delightful scene two

miles distant, with the beauties of which they declared themselves most

highly charmed at their return, as well as with the goodness of the lady

of the mansion, who had slipped out of the way that my wife and their

company might refresh themselves with the flowers and fruits with which

her garden abounded.

Tuesday, July 21.--This day, having paid our taxes of yesterday, we were

permitted to regale ourselves with more venison. Some of this we would

willingly have exchanged for mutton; but no such flesh was to be had

nearer than Portsmouth, from whence it would have cost more to convey

a joint to us than the freight of a Portugal ham from Lisbon to London

amounts to; for though the water-carriage be somewhat cheaper here than

at Deal, yet can you find no waterman who will go on board his boat,

unless by two or three hours' rowing he can get drunk for the residue of

the week.

And here I have an opportunity, which possibly may not offer again, of

publishing some observations on that political economy of this nation,

which, as it concerns only the regulation of the mob, is below the

notice of our great men; though on the due regulation of this order

depend many emoluments, which the great men themselves, or at least many

who tread close on their heels, may enjoy, as well as some dangers which

may some time or other arise from introducing a pure state of anarchy

among them. I will represent the case, as it appears to me, very fairly

and impartially between the mob and their betters. The whole mischief

which infects this part of our economy arises from the vague and

uncertain use of a word called liberty, of which, as scarce any two men

with whom I have ever conversed seem to have one and the same idea, I

am inclined to doubt whether there be any simple universal notion

represented by this word, or whether it conveys any clearer or more

determinate idea than some of those old Punic compositions of syllables

preserved in one of the comedies of Plautus, but at present, as I

conceive, not supposed to be understood by any one.

By liberty, however, I apprehend, is commonly understood the power of

doing what we please; not absolutely, for then it would be inconsistent

with law, by whose control the liberty of the freest people, except only

the Hottentots and wild Indians, must always be restrained.

But, indeed, however largely we extend, or however moderately we

confine, the sense of the word, no politician will, I presume, contend

that it is to pervade in an equal degree, and be, with the same extent,

enjoyed by, every member of society; no such polity having been ever

found, unless among those vile people just before commemorated. Among

the Greeks and Romans the servile and free conditions were opposed to

each other; and no man who had the misfortune to be enrolled under the

former could lay any claim to liberty till the right was conveyed to him

by that master whose slave he was, either by the means of conquest, of

purchase, or of birth.

This was the state of all the free nations in the world; and this, till

very lately, was understood to be the case of our own.

I will not indeed say this is the case at present, the lowest class of

our people having shaken off all the shackles of their superiors, and

become not only as free, but even freer, than most of their superiors. I

believe it cannot be doubted, though perhaps we have no recent instance

of it, that the personal attendance of every man who hath three hundred

pounds per annum, in parliament, is indispensably his duty; and that,

if the citizens and burgesses of any city or borough shall choose such

a one, however reluctant he appear, he may be obliged to attend, and be

forcibly brought to his duty by the sergeant-at-arms.

Again, there are numbers of subordinate offices, some of which are of

burden, and others of expense, in the civil government--all of which

persons who are qualified are liable to have imposed on them, may be

obliged to undertake and properly execute, notwithstanding any bodily

labor, or even danger, to which they may subject themselves, under the

penalty of fines and imprisonment; nay, and what may appear somewhat

hard, may be compelled to satisfy the losses which are eventually

incident, to that of sheriff in particular, out of their own private

fortunes; and though this should prove the ruin of a family, yet the

public, to whom the price is due, incurs no debt or obligation to

preserve its officer harmless, let his innocence appear ever so clearly.

I purposely omit the mention of those military or military duties

which our old constitution laid upon its greatest members. These might,

indeed, supply their posts with some other able-bodied men; but if no

such could have been found, the obligation nevertheless remained, and

they were compellable to serve in their own proper persons. The only

one, therefore, who is possessed of absolute liberty is the lowest

member of the society, who, if he prefers hunger, or the wild product of

the fields, hedges, lanes, and rivers, with the indulgence of ease and

laziness, to a food a little more delicate, but purchased at the expense

of labor, may lay himself under a shade; nor can be forced to take the

other alternative from that which he hath, I will not affirm whether

wisely or foolishly, chosen.

Here I may, perhaps, be reminded of the last Vagrant Act, where all

such persons are compellable to work for the usual and accustomed wages

allowed in the place; but this is a clause little known to the justices

of the peace, and least likely to be executed by those who do know it,

as they know likewise that it is formed on the ancient power of the

justices to fix and settle these wages every year, making proper

allowances for the scarcity and plenty of the times, the cheapness and

dearness of the place; and that THE USUAL AND ACCUSTOMED WAGES are words

without any force or meaning, when there are no such; but every man

spunges and raps whatever he can get; and will haggle as long and

struggle as hard to cheat his employer of twopence in a day's labor as

an honest tradesman will to cheat his customers of the same sum in a

yard of cloth or silk.

It is a great pity then that this power, or rather this practice, was

not revived; but, this having been so long omitted that it is become

obsolete, will be best done by a new law, in which this power, as well

as the consequent power of forcing the poor to labor at a moderate

and reasonable rate, should be well considered and their execution

facilitated; for gentlemen who give their time and labor gratis, and

even voluntarily, to the public, have a right to expect that all their

business be made as easy as possible; and to enact laws without doing

this is to fill our statute-books, much too full already, still

fuller with dead letter, of no use but to the printer of the acts of

parliament. That the evil which I have here pointed at is of itself

worth redressing, is, I apprehend, no subject of dispute; for why

should any persons in distress be deprived of the assistance of their

fellow-subjects, when they are willing amply to reward them for their

labor? or, why should the lowest of the people be permitted to exact

ten times the value of their work? For those exactions increase with the

degrees of necessity in their object, insomuch that on the former side

many are horribly imposed upon, and that often in no trifling matters.

I was very well assured that at Deal no less than ten guineas was

required, and paid by the supercargo of an Indiaman, for carrying him on

board two miles from the shore when she was just ready to sail; so that

his necessity, as his pillager well understood, was absolute. Again,

many others, whose indignation will not submit to such plunder, are

forced to refuse the assistance, though they are often great sufferers

by so doing. On the latter side, the lowest of the people are encouraged

in laziness and idleness; while they live by a twentieth part of the

labor that ought to maintain them, which is diametrically opposite to

the interest of the public; for that requires a great deal to be done,

not to be paid, for a little. And moreover, they are confirmed in

habits of exaction, and are taught to consider the distresses of their

superiors as their own fair emolument. But enough of this matter, of

which I at first intended only to convey a hint to those who are alone

capable of applying the remedy, though they are the last to whom the

notice of those evils would occur, without some such monitor as myself,

who am forced to travel about the world in the form of a passenger. I

cannot but say I heartily wish our governors would attentively

consider this method of fixing the price of labor, and by that means

of compelling the poor to work, since the due execution of such powers

will, I apprehend, be found the true and only means of making them

useful, and of advancing trade from its present visibly declining state

to the height to which Sir William Petty, in his Political Arithmetic,

thinks it capable of being carried.

In the afternoon the lady of the above-mentioned mansion called at our

inn, and left her compliments to us with Mrs. Francis, with an assurance

that while we continued wind-bound in that place, where she feared we

could be but indifferently accommodated, we were extremely welcome to

the use of anything which her garden or her house afforded. So polite a

message convinced us, in spite of some arguments to the contrary, that

we were not on the coast of Africa, or on some island where the few

savage inhabitants have little of human in them besides their form. And

here I mean nothing less than to derogate from the merit of this lady,

who is not only extremely polite in her behavior to strangers of her own

rank, but so extremely good and charitable to all her poor neighbors who

stand in need of her assistance, that she hath the universal love and

praises of all who live near her. But, in reality, how little doth the

acquisition of so valuable a character, and the full indulgence of so

worthy a disposition, cost those who possess it! Both are accomplished

by the very offals which fall from a table moderately plentiful. That

they are enjoyed therefore by so few arises truly from there being so

few who have any such disposition to gratify, or who aim at any such

character.

Wednesday, July 22.--This morning, after having been mulcted as usual,

we dispatched a servant with proper acknowledgments of the lady's

goodness; but confined our wants entirely to the productions of her

garden. He soon returned, in company with the gardener, both richly

laden with almost every particular which a garden at this most fruitful

season of the year produces. While we were regaling ourselves with

these, towards the close of our dinner, we received orders from our

commander, who had dined that day with some inferior officers on board

a man-of-war, to return instantly to the ship; for that the wind was

become favorable and he should weigh that evening. These orders were

soon followed by the captain himself, who was still in the utmost hurry,

though the occasion of it had long since ceased; for the wind had,

indeed, a little shifted that afternoon, but was before this very

quietly set down in its old quarters.

This last was a lucky hit for me; for, as the captain, to whose orders

we resolved to pay no obedience, unless delivered by himself, did

not return till past six, so much time seemed requisite to put up the

furniture of our bed-chamber or dining-room, for almost every article,

even to some of the chairs, were either our own or the captain's

property; so much more in conveying it as well as myself, as dead a

luggage as any, to the shore, and thence to the ship, that the night

threatened first to overtake us. A terrible circumstance to me, in my

decayed condition; especially as very heavy showers of rain, attended

with a high wind, continued to fall incessantly; the being carried

through which two miles in the dark, in a wet and open boat, seemed

little less than certain death. However, as my commander was absolute,

his orders peremptory, and my obedience necessary, I resolved to avail

myself of a philosophy which hath been of notable use to me in the

latter part of my life, and which is contained in this hemistich of

Virgil:--

----Superanda omnis fortuna ferendo est.

The meaning of which, if Virgil had any, I think I rightly understood,

and rightly applied. As I was therefore to be entirely passive in my

motion, I resolved to abandon myself to the conduct of those who were to

carry me into a cart when it returned from unloading the goods.

But before this, the captain, perceiving what had happened in the

clouds, and that the wind remained as much his enemy as ever, came

upstairs to me with a reprieve till the morning. This was, I own, very

agreeable news, and I little regretted the trouble of refurnishing my

apartment, by sending back for the goods.

Mrs. Francis was not well pleased with this.

As she understood the reprieve to be only till the morning, she saw

nothing but lodging to be possibly added, out of which she was to deduct

fire and candle, and the remainder, she thought, would scarce pay her

for her trouble. She exerted therefore all the ill-humor of which she

was mistress, and did all she could to thwart and perplex everything

during the whole evening.

Thursday, July 23.--Early in the morning the captain, who had remained

on shore all night, came to visit us, and to press us to make haste on

board. "I am resolved," says he, "not to lose a moment now the wind is

coming about fair: for my own part, I never was surer of a wind in

all my life." I use his very words; nor will I presume to interpret or

comment upon them farther than by observing that they were spoke in the

utmost hurry.

We promised to be ready as soon as breakfast was over, but this was not

so soon as was expected; for, in removing our goods the evening before,

the tea-chest was unhappily lost. Every place was immediately searched,

and many where it was impossible for it to be; for this was a loss

of much greater consequence than it may at first seem to many of my

readers. Ladies and valetudinarians do not easily dispense with the use

of this sovereign cordial in a single instance; but to undertake a long

voyage, without any probability of being supplied with it the whole way,

was above the reach of patience. And yet, dreadful as this calamity was,

it seemed unavoidable. The whole town of Ryde could not supply a single

leaf; for, as to what Mrs. Francis and the shop called by that name, it

was not of Chinese growth. It did not indeed in the least resemble tea,

either in smell or taste, or in any particular, unless in being a leaf;

for it was in truth no other than a tobacco of the mundungus species.

And as for the hopes of relief in any other port, they were not to be

depended upon, for the captain had positively declared he was sure of a

wind, and would let go his anchor no more till he arrived in the Tajo.

When a good deal of time had been spent, most of it indeed wasted on

this occasion, a thought occurred which every one wondered at its not

having presented itself the first moment. This was to apply to the

good lady, who could not fail of pitying and relieving such distress. A

messenger was immediately despatched with an account of our misfortune,

till whose return we employed ourselves in preparatives for our

departure, that we might have nothing to do but to swallow our breakfast

when it arrived. The tea-chest, though of no less consequence to us

than the military-chest to a general, was given up as lost, or rather

as stolen, for though I would not, for the world, mention any particular

name, it is certain we had suspicions, and all, I am afraid, fell on the

same person.

The man returned from the worthy lady with much expedition, and brought

with him a canister of tea, despatched with so true a generosity, as

well as politeness, that if our voyage had been as long again we should

have incurred no danger of being brought to a short allowance in this

most important article. At the very same instant likewise arrived

William the footman with our own tea-chest. It had been, indeed, left in

the hoy, when the other goods were re-landed, as William, when he first

heard it was missing, had suspected; and whence, had not the owner of

the hoy been unluckily out of the way, he had retrieved it soon enough

to have prevented our giving the lady an opportunity of displaying

some part of her goodness. To search the hoy was, indeed, too natural a

suggestion to have escaped any one, nor did it escape being mentioned

by many of us; but we were dissuaded from it by my wife's maid, who

perfectly well remembered she had left the chest in the bed-chamber; for

that she had never given it out of her hand in her way to or from the

hoy; but William perhaps knew the maid better, and best understood how

far she was to be believed; for otherwise he would hardly of his own

accord, after hearing her declaration, have hunted out the hoy-man, with

much pains and difficulty. Thus ended this scene, which began with such

appearance of distress, and ended with becoming the subject of mirth and

laughter. Nothing now remained but to pay our taxes, which were indeed

laid with inconceivable severity. Lodging was raised sixpence, fire in

the same proportion, and even candles, which had hitherto escaped, were

charged with a wantonness of imposition, from the beginning, and placed

under the style of oversight. We were raised a whole pound, whereas

we had only burned ten, in five nights, and the pound consisted of

twenty-four.

Lastly, an attempt was made which almost as far exceeds human credulity

to believe as it did human patience to submit to. This was to make us

pay as much for existing an hour or two as for existing a whole day; and

dressing dinner was introduced as an article, though we left the

house before either pot or spit had approached the fire. Here I own

my patience failed me, and I became an example of the truth of the

observation, "That all tyranny and oppression may be carried too far,

and that a yoke may be made too intolerable for the neck of the tamest

slave." When I remonstrated, with some warmth, against this grievance,

Mrs. Francis gave me a look, and left the room without making any

answer. She returned in a minute, running to me with pen, ink, and

paper, in her hand, and desired me to make my own bill; "for she hoped,"

she said "I did not expect that her house was to be dirtied, and her

goods spoiled and consumed for nothing. The whole is but thirteen

shillings. Can gentlefolks lie a whole night at a public-house for less?

If they can I am sure it is time to give off being a landlady: but

pay me what you please; I would have people know that I value money as

little as other folks. But I was always a fool, as I says to my husband,

and never knows which side my bread is buttered of. And yet, to be sure,

your honor shall be my warning not to be bit so again. Some folks knows

better than other some how to make their bills. Candles! why yes, to be

sure; why should not travelers pay for candles? I am sure I pays for my

candles, and the chandler pays the king's majesty for them; and if he

did not I must, so as it comes to the same thing in the end. To be sure

I am out of sixteens at present, but these burn as white and as clear,

though not quite so large. I expects my chandler here soon, or I would

send to Portsmouth, if your honor was to stay any time longer. But when

folks stays only for a wind, you knows there can be no dependence on

such!" Here she put on a little slyness of aspect, and seemed willing to

submit to interruption. I interrupted her accordingly by throwing down

half a guinea, and declared I had no more English money, which was

indeed true; and, as she could not immediately change the thirty-six

shilling pieces, it put a final end to the dispute. Mrs. Francis soon

left the room, and we soon after left the house; nor would this good

woman see us or wish us a good voyage. I must not, however, quit this

place, where we had been so ill-treated, without doing it impartial

justice, and recording what may, with the strictest truth, be said in

its favor.

First, then, as to its situation, it is, I think, most delightful, and

in the most pleasant spot in the whole island. It is true it wants the

advantage of that beautiful river which leads from Newport to Cowes;

but the prospect here extending to the sea, and taking in Portsmouth,

Spithead, and St. Helen's, would be more than a recompense for the loss

of the Thames itself, even in the most delightful part of Berkshire or

Buckinghamshire, though another Denham, or another Pope, should unite in

celebrating it. For my own part, I confess myself so entirely fond of a

sea prospect, that I think nothing on the land can equal it; and if it

be set off with shipping, I desire to borrow no ornament from the terra

firma. A fleet of ships is, in my opinion, the noblest object which

the art of man hath ever produced; and far beyond the power of those

architects who deal in brick, in stone, or in marble.

When the late Sir Robert Walpole, one of the best of men and of

ministers, used to equip us a yearly fleet at Spithead, his enemies of

taste must have allowed that he, at least, treated the nation with a

fine sight for their money. A much finer, indeed, than the same expense

in an encampment could have produced. For what indeed is the best idea

which the prospect of a number of huts can furnish to the mind, but of

a number of men forming themselves into a society before the art of

building more substantial houses was known? This, perhaps, would be

agreeable enough; but, in truth, there is a much worse idea ready to

step in before it, and that is of a body of cut-throats, the supports of

tyranny, the invaders of the just liberties and properties of mankind,

the plunderers of the industrious, the ravishers of the chaste, the

murderers of the innocent, and, in a word, the destroyers of the plenty,

the peace, and the safety, of their fellow-creatures.

And what, it may be said, are these men-of-war which seem so delightful

an object to our eyes? Are they not alike the support of tyranny and

oppression of innocence, carrying with them desolation and ruin wherever

their masters please to send them? This is indeed too true; and however

the ship of war may, in its bulk and equipment, exceed the honest

merchantman, I heartily wish there was no necessity for it; for, though

I must own the superior beauty of the object on one side, I am more

pleased with the superior excellence of the idea which I can raise in

my mind on the other, while I reflect on the art and industry of mankind

engaged in the daily improvements of commerce to the mutual benefit of

all countries, and to the establishment and happiness of social life.

This pleasant village is situated on a gentle ascent from the water,

whence it affords that charming prospect I have above described. Its

soil is a gravel, which, assisted with its declivity, preserves it

always so dry that immediately after the most violent rain a fine lady

may walk without wetting her silken shoes. The fertility of the place is

apparent from its extraordinary verdure, and it is so shaded with large

and flourishing elms, that its narrow lanes are a natural grove or walk,

which, in the regularity of its plantation, vies with the power of art,

and in its wanton exuberancy greatly exceeds it.

In a field in the ascent of this hill, about a quarter of a mile from

the sea, stands a neat little chapel. It is very small, but adequate to

the number of inhabitants; for the parish doth not seem to contain above

thirty houses.

At about two miles distant from this parish lives that polite and good

lady to whose kindness we were so much obliged. It is placed on a hill

whose bottom is washed by the sea, and which from its eminence at top,

commands a view of great part of the island as well as it does that of

the opposite shore. This house was formerly built by one Boyce, who,

from a blacksmith at Gosport, became possessed, by great success in

smuggling, of forty thousand pound. With part of this he purchased an

estate here, and, by chance probably, fixed on this spot for building

a large house. Perhaps the convenience of carrying on his business, to

which it is so well adapted, might dictate the situation to him. We can

hardly, at least, attribute it to the same taste with which he furnished

his house, or at least his library, by sending an order to a bookseller

in London to pack him up five hundred pounds' worth of his handsomest

books. They tell here several almost incredible stories of the

ignorance, the folly, and the pride, which this poor man and his wife

discovered during the short continuance of his prosperity; for he did

not long escape the sharp eyes of the revenue solicitors, and was, by

extents from the court of Exchequer, soon reduced below his original

state to that of confinement in the Fleet. All his effects were sold,

and among the rest his books, by an auction at Portsmouth, for a

very small price; for the bookseller was now discovered to have been

perfectly a master of his trade, and, relying on Mr. Boyce's finding

little time to read, had sent him not only the most lasting wares of his

shop, but duplicates of the same, under different titles.

His estate and house were purchased by a gentleman of these parts, whose

widow now enjoys them, and who hath improved them, particularly her

gardens, with so elegant a taste, that the painter who would assist his

imagination in the composition of a most exquisite landscape, or the

poet who would describe an earthly paradise, could nowhere furnish

themselves with a richer pattern.

We left this place about eleven in the morning, and were again conveyed,

with more sunshine than wind, aboard our ship.

Whence our captain had acquired his power of prophecy, when he promised

us and himself a prosperous wind, I will not determine; it is sufficient

to observe that he was a false prophet, and that the weathercocks

continued to point as before. He would not, however, so easily give up

his skill in prediction. He persevered in asserting that the wind was

changed, and, having weighed his anchor, fell down that afternoon to St.

Helen's, which was at about the distance of five miles; and whither

his friend the tide, in defiance of the wind, which was most manifestly

against him, softly wafted him in as many hours.

Here, about seven in the evening, before which time we could not procure

it, we sat down to regale ourselves with some roasted venison, which was

much better dressed than we imagined it would be, and an excellent cold

pasty which my wife had made at Ryde, and which we had reserved uncut

to eat on board our ship, whither we all cheerfully exulted in

being returned from the presence of Mrs. Francis, who, by the exact

resemblance she bore to a fury, seemed to have been with no great

propriety settled in paradise.

Friday, July 24.--As we passed by Spithead on the preceding evening we

saw the two regiments of soldiers who were just returned from Gibraltar

and Minorca; and this day a lieutenant belonging to one of them, who was

the captain's nephew, came to pay a visit to his uncle. He was what is

called by some a very pretty fellow; indeed, much too pretty a fellow

at his years; for he was turned of thirty-four, though his address and

conversation would have become him more before he had reached twenty. In

his conversation, it is true, there was something military enough, as it

consisted chiefly of oaths, and of the great actions and wise sayings

of Jack, and Will, and Tom of our regiment, a phrase eternally in his

mouth; and he seemed to conclude that it conveyed to all the officers

such a degree of public notoriety and importance that it entitled him

like the head of a profession, or a first minister, to be the subject

of conversation among those who had not the least personal acquaintance

with him. This did not much surprise me, as I have seen several examples

of the same; but the defects in his address, especially to the women,

were so great that they seemed absolutely inconsistent with the behavior

of a pretty fellow, much less of one in a red coat; and yet, besides

having been eleven years in the army, he had had, as his uncle informed

me, an education in France. This, I own, would have appeared to have

been absolutely thrown away had not his animal spirits, which were

likewise thrown away upon him in great abundance, borne the visible

stamp of the growth of that country. The character to which he had an

indisputable title was that of a merry fellow; so very merry was he that

he laughed at everything he said, and always before he spoke. Possibly,

indeed, he often laughed at what he did not utter, for every speech

begun with a laugh, though it did not always end with a jest. There was

no great analogy between the characters of the uncle and the nephew,

and yet they seemed entirely to agree in enjoying the honor which the

red-coat did to his family. This the uncle expressed with great pleasure

in his countenance, and seemed desirous of showing all present the honor

which he had for his nephew, who, on his side, was at some pains to

convince us of his concurring in this opinion, and at the same time of

displaying the contempt he had for the parts, as well as the occupation

of his uncle, which he seemed to think reflected some disgrace on

himself, who was a member of that profession which makes every man a

gentleman. Not that I would be understood to insinuate that the nephew

endeavored to shake off or disown his uncle, or indeed to keep him

at any distance. On the contrary, he treated him with the utmost

familiarity, often calling him Dick, and dear Dick, and old Dick, and

frequently beginning an oration with D--n me, Dick.

All this condescension on the part of the young man was received with

suitable marks of complaisance and obligation by the old one; especially

when it was attended with evidences of the same familiarity with general

officers and other persons of rank; one of whom, in particular, I know

to have the pride and insolence of the devil himself, and who, without

some strong bias of interest, is no more liable to converse familiarly

with a lieutenant than of being mistaken in his judgment of a fool;

which was not, perhaps, so certainly the case of the worthy lieutenant,

who, in declaring to us the qualifications which recommended men to his

countenance and conversation, as well as what effectually set a bar

to all hopes of that honor, exclaimed, "No, sir, by the d-- I hate all

fools-- No, d--n me, excuse me for that. That's a little too much, old

Dick. There are two or three officers of our regiment whom I know to be

fools; but d--n me if I am ever seen in their company. If a man hath a

fool of a relation, Dick, you know he can't help that, old boy." Such

jokes as these the old man not only tools in good part, but glibly

gulped down the whole narrative of his nephew; nor did he, I am

convinced, in the least doubt of our as readily swallowing the same.

This made him so charmed with the lieutenant, that it is probable we

should have been pestered with him the whole evening, had not the north

wind, dearer to our sea-captain even than this glory of his family,

sprung suddenly up, and called aloud to him to weigh his anchor. While

this ceremony was performing, the sea-captain ordered out his boat to

row the land-captain to shore; not indeed on an uninhabited island, but

one which, in this part, looked but little better, not presenting us the

view of a single house. Indeed, our old friend, when his boat returned

on shore, perhaps being no longer able to stifle his envy of the

superiority of his nephew, told us with a smile that the young man had a

good five mile to walk before he could be accommodated with a passage to

Portsmouth.

It appeared now that the captain had been only mistaken in the date of

his prediction, by placing the event a day earlier than it happened; for

the wind which now arose was not only favorable but brisk, and was no

sooner in reach of our sails than it swept us away by the back of the

Isle of Wight, and, having in the night carried us by Christchurch and

Peveral-point, brought us the next noon, Saturday, July 25, oft the

island of Portland, so famous for the smallness and sweetness of its

mutton, of which a leg seldom weighs four pounds. We would have bought

a sheep, but our captain would not permit it; though he needed not have

been in such a hurry, for presently the wind, I will not positively

assert in resentment of his surliness, showed him a dog's trick, and

slyly slipped back again to his summer-house in the south-west.

The captain now grew outrageous, and, declaring open war with the wind,

took a resolution, rather more bold than wise, of sailing in defiance of

it, and in its teeth. He swore he would let go his anchor no more, but

would beat the sea while he had either yard or sail left. He accordingly

stood from the shore, and made so large a tack that before night, though

he seemed to advance but little on his way, he was got out of sight of

land.

Towards evening the wind began, in the captain's own language,

and indeed it freshened so much, that before ten it blew a perfect

hurricane. The captain having got, as he supposed, to a safe distance,

tacked again towards the English shore; and now the wind veered a point

only in his favor, and continued to blow with such violence, that the

ship ran above eight knots or miles an hour during this whole day and

tempestuous night till bed-time. I was obliged to betake myself

once more to my solitude, for my women were again all down in their

sea-sickness, and the captain was busy on deck; for he began to grow

uneasy, chiefly, I believe, because he did not well know where he

was, and would, I am convinced, have been very glad to have been in

Portland-road, eating some sheep's-head broth.

Having contracted no great degree of good-humor by living a whole day

alone, without a single soul to converse with, I took but ill physic to

purge it off, by a bed-conversation with the captain, who, amongst many

bitter lamentations of his fate, and protesting he had more patience

than a Job, frequently intermixed summons to the commanding officer on

the deck, who now happened to be one Morrison, a carpenter, the only

fellow that had either common sense or common civility in the ship. Of

Morrison he inquired every quarter of an hour concerning the state

of affairs: the wind, the care of the ship, and other matters of

navigation. The frequency of these summons, as well as the solicitude

with which they were made, sufficiently testified the state of the

captain's mind; he endeavored to conceal it, and would have given no

small alarm to a man who had either not learned what it is to die, or

known what it is to be miserable. And my dear wife and child must pardon

me, if what I did not conceive to be any great evil to myself I was not

much terrified with the thoughts of happening to them; in truth, I have

often thought they are both too good and too gentle to be trusted to the

power of any man I know, to whom they could possibly be so trusted.

Can I say then I had no fear? indeed I cannot. Reader, I was afraid for

thee, lest thou shouldst have been deprived of that pleasure thou art

now enjoying; and that I should not live to draw out on paper that

military character which thou didst peruse in the journal of yesterday.

From all these fears we were relieved, at six in the morning, by the

arrival of Mr. Morrison, who acquainted us that he was sure he beheld

land very near; for he could not see half a mile, by reason of the

haziness of the weather. This land he said was, he believed, the

Berry-head, which forms one side of Torbay: the captain declared that it

was impossible, and swore, on condition he was right, he would give him

his mother for a maid. A forfeit which became afterwards strictly due

and payable; for the captain, whipping on his night-gown, ran up without

his breeches, and within half an hour returning into the cabin, wished

me joy of our lying safe at anchor in the bay.

Sunday, July 26.--Things now began to put on an aspect very different

from what they had lately worn; the news that the ship had almost lost

its mizzen, and that we had procured very fine clouted cream and fresh

bread and butter from the shore, restored health and spirits to our

women, and we all sat down to a very cheerful breakfast. But, however

pleasant our stay promised to be here, we were all desirous it should

be short: I resolved immediately to despatch my man into the country

to purchase a present of cider, for my friends of that which is called

Southam, as well as to take with me a hogshead of it to Lisbon; for it

is, in my opinion, much more delicious than that which is the growth

of Herefordshire. I purchased three hogsheads for five pounds ten

shillings, all which I should have scarce thought worth mentioning, had

I not believed it might be of equal service to the honest farmer who

sold it me, and who is by the neighboring gentlemen reputed to deal in

the very best; and to the reader, who, from ignorance of the means of

providing better for himself, swallows at a dearer rate the juice

of Middlesex turnip, instead of that Vinum Pomonae which Mr. Giles

Leverance of Cheeshurst, near Dartmouth in Devon, will, at the price of

forty shillings per hogshead, send in double casks to any part of the

world. Had the wind been very sudden in shifting, I had lost my cider by

an attempt of a boatman to exact, according to custom. He required five

shillings for conveying my man a mile and a half to the shore, and

four more if he stayed to bring him back. This I thought to be such

insufferable impudence that I ordered him to be immediately chased from

the ship, without any answer. Indeed, there are few inconveniences that

I would not rather encounter than encourage the insolent demands of

these wretches, at the expense of my own indignation, of which I own

they are not the only objects, but rather those who purchase a paltry

convenience by encouraging them. But of this I have already spoken very

largely. I shall conclude, therefore, with the leave which this fellow

took of our ship; saying he should know it again, and would not put

off from the shore to relieve it in any distress whatever. It will,

doubtless, surprise many of my readers to hear that, when we lay at

anchor within a mile or two of a town several days together, and even in

the most temperate weather, we should frequently want fresh provisions

and herbage, and other emoluments of the shore, as much as if we had

been a hundred leagues from land. And this too while numbers of boats

were in our sight, whose owners get their livelihood by rowing people

up and down, and could be at any time summoned by a signal to our

assistance, and while the captain had a little boat of his own, with men

always ready to row it at his command.

This, however, hath been partly accounted for already by the imposing

disposition of the people, who asked so much more than the proper price

of their labor. And as to the usefulness of the captain's boat, it

requires to be a little expatiated upon, as it will tend to lay

open some of the grievances which demand the utmost regard of our

legislature, as they affect the most valuable part of the king's

subjects--those by whom the commerce of the nation is carried into

execution. Our captain then, who was a very good and experienced seaman,

having been above thirty years the master of a vessel, part of which

he had served, so he phrased it, as commander of a privateer, and had

discharged himself with great courage and conduct, and with as great

success, discovered the utmost aversion to the sending his boat ashore

whenever we lay wind-bound in any of our harbors. This aversion did not

arise from any fear of wearing out his boat by using it, but was, in

truth, the result of experience, that it was easier to send his men

on shore than to recall them. They acknowledged him to be their master

while they remained on shipboard, but did not allow his power to extend

to the shores, where they had no sooner set their foot than every man

became sui juris, and thought himself at full liberty to return when he

pleased. Now it is not any delight that these fellows have in the fresh

air or verdant fields on the land. Every one of them would prefer

his ship and his hammock to all the sweets of Arabia the Happy; but,

unluckily for them, there are in every seaport in England certain

houses whose chief livelihood depends on providing entertainment for the

gentlemen of the jacket. For this purpose they are always well furnished

with those cordial liquors which do immediately inspire the heart with

gladness, banishing all careful thoughts, and indeed all others,

from the mind, and opening the mouth with songs of cheerfulness and

thanksgiving for the many wonderful blessings with which a seafaring

life overflows.

For my own part, however whimsical it may appear, I confess I have

thought the strange story of Circe in the Odyssey no other than an

ingenious allegory, in which Homer intended to convey to his countrymen

the same kind of instruction which we intend to communicate to our own

in this digression. As teaching the art of war to the Greeks was the

plain design of the Iliad, so was teaching them the art of navigation

the no less manifest intention of the Odyssey. For the improvement of

this, their situation was most excellently adapted; and accordingly we

find Thucydides, in the beginning of his history, considers the Greeks

as a set of pirates or privateers, plundering each other by sea.

This being probably the first institution of commerce before the Ars

Cauponaria was invented, and merchants, instead of robbing, began to

cheat and outwit each other, and by degrees changed the Metabletic,

the only kind of traffic allowed by Aristotle in his Politics, into the

Chrematistic.

By this allegory then I suppose Ulysses to have been the captain of a

merchant-ship, and Circe some good ale-wife, who made his crew drunk

with the spirituous liquors of those days. With this the transformation

into swine, as well as all other incidents of the fable, will notably

agree; and thus a key will be found out for unlocking the whole mystery,

and forging at least some meaning to a story which, at present, appears

very strange and absurd.

Hence, moreover, will appear the very near resemblance between the

sea-faring men of all ages and nations; and here perhaps may be

established the truth and justice of that observation, which will occur

oftener than once in this voyage, that all human flesh is not the same

flesh, but that there is one kind of flesh of landmen, and another of

seamen.

Philosophers, divines, and others, who have treated the gratification

of human appetites with contempt, have, among other instances, insisted

very strongly on that satiety which is so apt to overtake them even in

the very act of enjoyment. And here they more particularly deserve

our attention, as most of them may be supposed to speak from their own

experience, and very probably gave us their lessons with a full stomach.

Thus hunger and thirst, whatever delight they may afford while we are

eating and drinking, pass both away from us with the plate and the cup;

and though we should imitate the Romans, if, indeed, they were such dull

beasts, which I can scarce believe, to unload the belly like a dung-pot,

in order to fill it again with another load, yet would the pleasure be

so considerably lessened that it would scarce repay us the trouble of

purchasing it with swallowing a basin of camomile tea. A second haunch

of venison, or a second dose of turtle, would hardly allure a city

glutton with its smell. Even the celebrated Jew himself, when well

filled with calipash and calipee, goes contentedly home to tell his

money, and expects no more pleasure from his throat during the

next twenty-four hours. Hence I suppose Dr. South took that elegant

comparison of the joys of a speculative man to the solemn silence of an

Archimedes over a problem, and those of a glutton to the stillness of a

sow at her wash. A simile which, if it became the pulpit at all, could

only become it in the afternoon. Whereas in those potations which the

mind seems to enjoy, rather than the bodily appetite, there is happily

no such satiety; but the more a man drinks, the more he desires; as if,

like Mark Anthony in Dryden, his appetite increased with feeding, and

this to such an immoderate degree, ut nullus sit desiderio aut pudor

aut modus. Hence, as with the gang of Captain Ulysses, ensues so total

a transformation, that the man no more continues what he was. Perhaps

he ceases for a time to be at all; or, though he may retain the same

outward form and figure he had before, yet is his nobler part, as we are

taught to call it, so changed, that, instead of being the same man,

he scarce remembers what he was a few hours before. And this

transformation, being once obtained, is so easily preserved by the same

potations, which induced no satiety, that the captain in vain sends or

goes in quest of his crew. They know him no longer; or, if they do,

they acknowledge not his power, having indeed as entirely forgotten

themselves as if they had taken a large draught of the river of Lethe.

Nor is the captain always sure of even finding out the place to which

Circe hath conveyed them. There are many of those houses in every

port-town. Nay, there are some where the sorceress doth not trust only

to her drugs; but hath instruments of a different kind to execute

her purposes, by whose means the tar is effectually secreted from the

knowledge and pursuit of his captain. This would, indeed, be very fatal,

was it not for one circumstance; that the sailor is seldom provided

with the proper bait for these harpies. However, the contrary sometimes

happens, as these harpies will bite at almost anything, and will snap at

a pair of silver buttons, or buckles, as surely as at the specie itself.

Nay, sometimes they are so voracious, that the very naked hook will go

down, and the jolly young sailor is sacrificed for his own sake.

In vain, at such a season as this, would the vows of a pious heathen

have prevailed over Neptune, Aeolus, or any other marine deity. In

vain would the prayers of a Christian captain be attended with the

like success. The wind may change how it pleases while all hands are on

shore; the anchor would remain firm in the ground, and the ship would

continue in durance, unless, like other forcible prison-breakers, it

forcibly got loose for no good purpose. Now, as the favor of winds and

courts, and such like, is always to be laid hold on at the very first

motion, for within twenty-four hours all may be changed again; so, in

the former case, the loss of a day may be the loss of a voyage: for,

though it may appear to persons not well skilled in navigation, who see

ships meet and sail by each other, that the wind blows sometimes east

and west, north and south, backwards and forwards, at the same instant;

yet, certain it is that the land is so contrived, that even the same

wind will not, like the same horse, always bring a man to the end of

his journey; but, that the gale which the mariner prayed heartily for

yesterday, he may as heartily deprecate to-morrow; while all use

and benefit which would have arisen to him from the westerly wind of

to-morrow may be totally lost and thrown away by neglecting the offer of

the easterly blast which blows to-day.

Hence ensues grief and disreputation to the innocent captain, loss and

disappointment to the worthy merchant, and not seldom great prejudice to

the trade of a nation whose manufactures are thus liable to lie unsold

in a foreign warehouse the market being forestalled by some rival

whose sailors are under a better discipline. To guard against these

inconveniences the prudent captain takes every precaution in his power;

he makes the strongest contracts with his crew, and thereby binds them

so firmly, that none but the greatest or least of men can break through

them with impunity; but for one of these two reasons, which I will not

determine, the sailor, like his brother fish the eel, is too slippery to

be held, and plunges into his element with perfect impunity. To speak a

plain truth, there is no trusting to any contract with one whom the wise

citizens of London call a bad man; for, with such a one, though your

bond be ever so strong, it will prove in the end good for nothing.

What then is to be done in this case? What, indeed, but to call in the

assistance of that tremendous magistrate, the justice of peace, who can,

and often doth, lay good and bad men in equal durance; and, though he

seldom cares to stretch his bonds to what is great, never finds anything

too minute for their detention, but will hold the smallest reptile alive

so fast in his noose, that he can never get out till he is let drop

through it. Why, therefore, upon the breach of those contracts, should

not an immediate application be made to the nearest magistrate of this

order, who should be empowered to convey the delinquent either to ship

or to prison, at the election of the captain, to be fettered by the leg

in either place? But, as the case now stands, the condition of this poor

captain without any commission, and of this absolute commander without

any power, is much worse than we have hitherto shown it to be; for,

notwithstanding all the aforesaid contracts to sail in the good ship

the Elizabeth, if the sailor should, for better wages, find it more his

interest to go on board the better ship the Mary, either before their

setting out or on their speedy meeting in some port, he may prefer the

latter without any other danger than that of "doing what he ought not

to have done," contrary to a rule which he is seldom Christian enough to

have much at heart, while the captain is generally too good a Christian

to punish a man out of revenge only, when he is to be at a considerable

expense for so doing. There are many other deficiencies in our laws

relating to maritime affairs, and which would probably have been long

since corrected, had we any seamen in the House of Commons. Not that I

would insinuate that the legislature wants a supply of many gentlemen in

the sea-service; but, as these gentlemen are by their attendance in the

house unfortunately prevented from ever going to sea, and there learning

what they might communicate to their landed brethren, these latter

remain as ignorant in that branch of knowledge as they would be if none

but courtiers and fox-hunters had been elected into parliament, without

a single fish among them. The following seems to me to be an effect of

this kind, and it strikes me the stronger as I remember the case to have

happened, and remember it to have been dispunishable. A captain of a

trading vessel, of which he was part owner, took in a large freight of

oats at Liverpool, consigned to the market at Bearkey: this he carried

to a port in Hampshire, and there sold it as his own, and, freighting

his vessel with wheat for the port of Cadiz, in Spain, dropped it at

Oporto in his way; and there, selling it for his own use, took in a

lading of wine, with which he sailed again, and, having converted it in

the same manner, together with a large sum of money with which he was

intrusted, for the benefit of certain merchants, sold the ship and cargo

in another port, and then wisely sat down contented with the fortune

he had made, and returned to London to enjoy the remainder of his days,

with the fruits of his former labors and a good conscience.

The sum he brought home with him consisted of near six thousand pounds,

all in specie, and most of it in that coin which Portugal distributes so

liberally over Europe.

He was not yet old enough to be past all sense of pleasure, nor so

puffed up with the pride of his good fortune as to overlook his old

acquaintances the journeymen tailors, from among whom he had been

formerly pressed into the sea-service, and, having there laid the

foundation of his future success by his shares in prizes, had afterwards

become captain of a trading vessel, in which he purchased an interest,

and had soon begun to trade in the honorable manner above mentioned. The

captain now took up his residence at an ale-house in Drury-lane, where,

having all his money by him in a trunk, he spent about five pounds a

day among his old friends the gentlemen and ladies of those parts. The

merchant of Liverpool, having luckily had notice from a friend during

the blaze of his fortune, did, by the assistance of a justice of peace,

without the assistance of the law, recover his whole loss. The captain,

however, wisely chose to refund no more; but, perceiving with what hasty

strides Envy was pursuing his fortune, he took speedy means to retire

out of her reach, and to enjoy the rest of his wealth in an inglorious

obscurity; nor could the same justice overtake him time enough to assist

a second merchant as he had done the first.

This was a very extraordinary case, and the more so as the ingenious

gentleman had steered entirely clear of all crimes in our law. Now, how

it comes about that a robbery so very easy to be committed, and to

which there is such immediate temptation always before the eyes of

these fellows, should receive the encouragement of impunity, is to

be accounted for only from the oversight of the legislature, as that

oversight can only be, I think, derived from the reasons I have assigned

for it.

But I will dwell no longer on this subject. If what I have here said

should seem of sufficient consequence to engage the attention of any

man in power, and should thus be the means of applying any remedy to the

most inveterate evils, at least, I have obtained my whole desire, and

shall have lain so long wind-bound in the ports of this kingdom to some

purpose. I would, indeed, have this work--which, if I should live to

finish it, a matter of no great certainty, if indeed of any great hope

to me, will be probably the last I shall ever undertake--to produce some

better end than the mere diversion of the reader.

Monday.--This day our captain went ashore, to dine with a gentleman who

lives in these parts, and who so exactly resembles the character given

by Homer of Axylus, that the only difference I can trace between them

is, the one, living by the highway, erected his hospitality chiefly

in favor of land-travelers; and the other, living by the water-side,

gratified his humanity by accommodating the wants of the mariner.

In the evening our commander received a visit from a brother bashaw, who

lay wind-bound in the same harbor. This latter captain was a Swiss. He

was then master of a vessel bound to Guinea, and had formerly been

a privateering, when our own hero was employed in the same laudable

service. The honesty and freedom of the Switzer, his vivacity, in which

he was in no respect inferior to his near neighbors the French,

the awkward and affected politeness, which was likewise of French

extraction, mixed with the brutal roughness of the English tar--for he

had served under the colors of this nation and his crew had been of the

same--made such an odd variety, such a hotch-potch of character, that I

should have been much diverted with him, had not his voice, which was as

loud as a speaking-trumpet, unfortunately made my head ache. The noise

which he conveyed into the deaf ears of his brother captain, who sat on

one side of him, the soft addresses with which, mixed with awkward bows,

he saluted the ladies on the other, were so agreeably contrasted, that

a man must not only have been void of all taste of humor, and insensible

of mirth, but duller than Cibber is represented in the Dunciad, who

could be unentertained with him a little while; for, I confess, such

entertainments should always be very short, as they are very liable to

pall. But he suffered not this to happen at present; for, having

given us his company a quarter of an hour only, he retired, after many

apologies for the shortness of his visit.

Tuesday.--The wind being less boisterous than it had hitherto been since

our arrival here, several fishing-boats, which the tempestuous weather

yesterday had prevented from working, came on board us with fish. This

was so fresh, so good in kind, and so very cheap, that we supplied

ourselves in great numbers, among which were very large soles at

fourpence a pair, and whitings of almost a preposterous size at

ninepence a score. The only fish which bore any price was a john doree,

as it is called. I bought one of at least four pounds weight for as many

shillings. It resembles a turbot in shape, but exceeds it in firmness

and flavor. The price had the appearance of being considerable when

opposed to the extraordinary cheapness of others of value, but was, in

truth, so very reasonable when estimated by its goodness, that it left

me under no other surprise than how the gentlemen of this country, not

greatly eminent for the delicacy of their taste, had discovered the

preference of the doree to all other fish: but I was informed that Mr.

Quin, whose distinguishing tooth hath been so justly celebrated, had

lately visited Plymouth, and had done those honors to the doree which

are so justly due to it from that sect of modern philosophers who,

with Sir Epicure Mammon, or Sir Epicure Quin, their head, seem more to

delight in a fish-pond than in a garden, as the old Epicureans are said

to have done.

Unfortunately for the fishmongers of London, the doree resides only in

those seas; for, could any of this company but convey one to the temple

of luxury under the Piazza, where Macklin the high-priest daily serves

up his rich offerings to that goddess, great would be the reward of that

fishmonger, in blessings poured down upon him from the goddess, as great

would his merit be towards the high-priest, who could never be thought

to overrate such valuable incense.

And here, having mentioned the extreme cheapness of fish in the

Devonshire sea, and given some little hint of the extreme dearness with

which this commodity is dispensed by those who deal in it in London, I

cannot pass on without throwing forth an observation or two, with the

same view with which I have scattered my several remarks through this

voyage, sufficiently satisfied in having finished my life, as I have

probably lost it, in the service of my country, from the best of

motives, though it should be attended with the worst of success. Means

are always in our power; ends are very seldom so.

Of all the animal foods with which man is furnished, there are none so

plenty as fish. A little rivulet, that glides almost unperceived through

a vast tract of rich land, will support more hundreds with the flesh of

its inhabitants than the meadow will nourish individuals. But if this

be true of rivers, it is much truer of the sea-shores, which abound with

such immense variety of fish that the curious fisherman, after he hath

made his draught, often culls only the daintiest part and leaves the

rest of his prey to perish on the shore. If this be true it would

appear, I think, that there is nothing which might be had in such

abundance, and consequently so cheap, as fish, of which Nature seems to

have provided such inexhaustible stores with some peculiar design. In

the production of terrestrial animals she proceeds with such slowness,

that in the larger kind a single female seldom produces more than one

a-year, and this again requires three, for, or five years more to bring

it to perfection. And though the lesser quadrupeds, those of the wild

kind particularly, with the birds, do multiply much faster, yet can none

of these bear any proportion with the aquatic animals, of whom every

female matrix is furnished with an annual offspring almost exceeding the

power of numbers, and which, in many instances at least, a single year

is capable of bringing to some degree of maturity.

What then ought in general to be so plentiful, what so cheap, as fish?

What then so properly the food of the poor? So in many places they are,

and so might they always be in great cities, which are always situated

near the sea, or on the conflux of large rivers. How comes it then, to

look no farther abroad for instances, that in our city of London the

case is so far otherwise that, except that of sprats, there is not one

poor palate in a hundred that knows the taste of fish?

It is true indeed that this taste is generally of such excellent flavor

that it exceeds the power of French cookery to treat the palates of

the rich with anything more exquisitely delicate; so that was fish the

common food of the poor it might put them too much upon an equality with

their betters in the great article of eating, in which, at present, in

the opinion of some, the great difference in happiness between man and

man consists. But this argument I shall treat with the utmost disdain:

for if ortolans were as big as buzzards, and at the same time as plenty

as sparrows, I should hold it yet reasonable to indulge the poor with

the dainty, and that for this cause especially, that the rich would soon

find a sparrow, if as scarce as an ortolan, to be much the greater, as

it would certainly be the rarer, dainty of the two.

Vanity or scarcity will be always the favorite of luxury; but honest

hunger will be satisfied with plenty. Not to search deeper into the

cause of the evil, I should think it abundantly sufficient to propose

the remedies of it. And, first, I humbly submit the absolute necessity

of immediately hanging all the fishmongers within the bills of

mortality; and, however it might have been some time ago the opinion of

mild and temporizing men that the evil complained of might be removed by

gentler methods, I suppose at this day there are none who do not see the

impossibility of using such with any effect. Cuncta prius tentanda

might have been formerly urged with some plausibility, but cuncta

prius tentata may now be replied: for surely, if a few monopolizing

fishmongers could defeat that excellent scheme of the Westminster

market, to the erecting which so many justices of peace, as well as

other wise and learned men, did so vehemently apply themselves, that

they might be truly said not only to have laid the whole strength of

their heads, but of their shoulders too, to the business, it would be a

vain endeavor for any other body of men to attempt to remove so stubborn

a nuisance.

If it should be doubted whether we can bring this case within the letter

of any capital law now subsisting, I am ashamed to own it cannot; for

surely no crime better deserves such punishment; but the remedy may,

nevertheless, be immediate; and if a law was made at the beginning of

next session, to take place immediately, by which the starving thousands

of poor was declared to be felony, without benefit of clergy, the

fishmongers would be hanged before the end of the session. A second

method of filling the mouths of the poor, if not with loaves at least

with fishes, is to desire the magistrates to carry into execution one at

least out of near a hundred acts of parliament, for preserving the small

fry of the river of Thames, by which means as few fish would satisfy

thousands as may now be devoured by a small number of individuals. But

while a fisherman can break through the strongest meshes of an act

of parliament, we may be assured he will learn so to contrive his own

meshes that the smallest fry will not be able to swim through them.

Other methods may, we doubt not, he suggested by those who shall

attentively consider the evil here hinted at; but we have dwelt too long

on it already, and shall conclude with observing that it is difficult to

affirm whether the atrocity of the evil itself, the facility of curing

it, or the shameful neglect of the cure, be the more scandalous or more

astonishing.

After having, however, gloriously regaled myself with this food, I was

washing it down with some good claret with my wife and her friend, in

the cabin, when the captain's valet-de-chambre, head cook, house and

ship steward, footman in livery and out on't, secretary and fore-mast

man, all burst into the cabin at once, being, indeed, all but one

person, and, without saying, by your leave, began to pack half a

hogshead of small beer in bottles, the necessary consequence of which

must have been either a total stop to conversation at that cheerful

season when it is most agreeable, or the admitting that polyonymous

officer aforesaid to the participation of it. I desired him therefore to

delay his purpose a little longer, but he refused to grant my request;

nor was he prevailed on to quit the room till he was threatened with

having one bottle to pack more than his number, which then happened to

stand empty within my reach. With these menaces he retired at last, but

not without muttering some menaces on his side, and which, to our great

terror, he failed not to put into immediate execution.

Our captain was gone to dinner this day with his Swiss brother;

and, though he was a very sober man, was a little elevated with some

champagne, which, as it cost the Swiss little or nothing, he dispensed

at his table more liberally than our hospitable English noblemen put

about those bottles, which the ingenious Peter Taylor teaches a led

captain to avoid by distinguishing by the name of that generous liquor,

which all humble companions are taught to postpone to the flavor of

methuen, or honest port.

While our two captains were thus regaling themselves, and celebrating

their own heroic exploits with all the inspiration which the liquor, at

least, of wit could afford them, the polyonymous officer arrived, and,

being saluted by the name of Honest Tom, was ordered to sit down and

take his glass before he delivered his message; for every sailor is by

turns his captain's mate over a cann, except only that captain bashaw

who presides in a man-of-war, and who upon earth has no other mate,

unless it be another of the same bashaws. Tom had no sooner swallowed

his draught than he hastily began his narrative, and faithfully related

what had happened on board our ship; we say faithfully, though from what

happened it may be suspected that Tom chose to add perhaps only five or

six immaterial circumstances, as is always I believe the case, and may

possibly have been done by me in relating this very story, though it

happened not many hours ago.

No sooner was the captain informed of the interruption which had been

given to his officer, and indeed to his orders, for he thought no time

so convenient as that of his absence for causing any confusion in the

cabin, than he leaped with such haste from his chair that he had like to

have broke his sword, with which he always begirt himself when he walked

out of his ship, and sometimes when he walked about in it; at the same

time, grasping eagerly that other implement called a cockade, which

modern soldiers wear on their helmets with the same view as the ancients

did their crests--to terrify the enemy he muttered something, but so

inarticulately that the word DAMN was only intelligible; he then hastily

took leave of the Swiss captain, who was too well bred to press his stay

on such an occasion, and leaped first from the ship to his boat, and

then from his boat to his own ship, with as much fierceness in his

looks as he had ever expressed on boarding his defenseless prey in the

honorable calling of a privateer. Having regained the middle deck, he

paused a moment while Tom and others loaded themselves with bottles, and

then descending into the cabin exclaimed with a thundering voice, "D--n

me, why arn't the bottles stowed in, according to my orders?"

I answered him very mildly that I had prevented his man from doing

it, as it was at an inconvenient time to me, and as in his absence, at

least, I esteemed the cabin to be my own. "Your cabin!" repeated he many

times; "no, d--n me! 'tis my cabin. Your cabin! d--n me! I have brought

my hogs to a fair market. I suppose indeed you think it your cabin, and

your ship, by your commanding in it; but I will command in it, d--n

me! I will show the world I am the commander, and nobody but I! Did you

think I sold you the command of my ship for that pitiful thirty pounds?

I wish I had not seen you nor your thirty pounds aboard of her." He then

repeated the words thirty pounds often, with great disdain, and with a

contempt which I own the sum did not seem to deserve in my eye, either

in itself or on the present occasion; being, indeed, paid for the

freight of ---- weight of human flesh, which is above fifty per cent

dearer than the freight of any other luggage, whilst in reality it takes

up less room; in fact, no room at all.

In truth, the sum was paid for nothing more than for a liberty to six

persons (two of them servants) to stay on board a ship while she sails

from one port to another, every shilling of which comes clear into the

captain's pocket. Ignorant people may perhaps imagine, especially when

they are told that the captain is obliged to sustain them, that their

diet at least is worth something, which may probably be now and then

so far the case as to deduct a tenth part from the net profits on this

account; but it was otherwise at present; for when I had contracted with

the captain at a price which I by no means thought moderate, I had some

content in thinking I should have no more to pay for my voyage; but I

was whispered that it was expected the passengers should find themselves

in several things; such as tea, wine, and such like; and particularly

that gentlemen should stow of the latter a much larger quantity than

they could use, in order to leave the remainder as a present to the

captain at the end of the voyage; and it was expected likewise that

gentlemen should put aboard some fresh stores, and the more of such

things were put aboard the welcomer they would be to the captain.

I was prevailed with by these hints to follow the advice proposed; and

accordingly, besides tea and a large hamper of wine, with several hams

and tongues, I caused a number of live chickens and sheep to be conveyed

aboard; in truth, treble the quantity of provisions which would have

supported the persons I took with me, had the voyage continued three

weeks, as it was supposed, with a bare possibility, it might.

Indeed it continued much longer; but as this was occasioned by our being

wind-bound in our own ports, it was by no means of any ill consequence

to the captain, as the additional stores of fish, fresh meat,

butter, bread, &c., which I constantly laid in, greatly exceeded the

consumption, and went some way in maintaining the ship's crew. It is

true I was not obliged to do this; but it seemed to be expected; for the

captain did not think himself obliged to do it, and I can truly say I

soon ceased to expect it of him. He had, I confess, on board a number of

fowls and ducks sufficient for a West India voyage; all of them, as he

often said, "Very fine birds, and of the largest breed." This I believe

was really the fact, and I can add that they were all arrived at the

full perfection of their size. Nor was there, I am convinced, any want

of provisions of a more substantial kind; such as dried beef, pork,

and fish; so that the captain seemed ready to perform his contract,

and amply to provide for his passengers. What I did then was not from

necessity, but, perhaps, from a less excusable motive, and was by no

means chargeable to the account of the captain.

But, let the motive have been what it would, the consequence was still

the same; and this was such that I am firmly persuaded the whole pitiful

thirty pounds came pure and neat into the captain's pocket, and not only

so, but attended with the value of ten pound more in sundries into

the bargain. I must confess myself therefore at a loss how the epithet

PITIFUL came to be annexed to the above sum; for, not being a pitiful

price for what it was given, I cannot conceive it to be pitiful in

itself; nor do I believe it is thought by the greatest men in the

kingdom; none of whom would scruple to search for it in the dirtiest

kennel, where they had only a reasonable hope of success. How,

therefore, such a sum should acquire the idea of pitiful in the eyes

of the master of a ship seems not easy to be accounted for; since it

appears more likely to produce in him ideas of a different kind. Some

men, perhaps, are no more sincere in the contempt for it which they

express than others in their contempt of money in general; and I am the

rather inclined to this persuasion, as I have seldom heard of either

who have refused or refunded this their despised object. Besides, it is

sometimes impossible to believe these professions, as every action of

the man's life is a contradiction to it. Who can believe a tradesman who

says he would not tell his name for the profit he gets by the selling

such a parcel of goods, when he hath told a thousand lies in order to

get it? Pitiful, indeed, is often applied to an object not absolutely,

but comparatively with our expectations, or with a greater object: in

which sense it is not easy to set any bounds to the use of the word.

Thus, a handful of halfpence daily appear pitiful to a porter, and a

handful of silver to a drawer. The latter, I am convinced, at a polite

tavern, will not tell his name (for he will not give you any answer)

under the price of gold. And in this sense thirty pound may be accounted

pitiful by the lowest mechanic.

One difficulty only seems to occur, and that is this: how comes it that,

if the profits of the meanest arts are so considerable, the professors

of them are not richer than we generally see them? One answer to this

shall suffice. Men do not become rich by what they get, but by what they

keep. He who is worth no more than his annual wages or salary, spends

the whole; he will be always a beggar let his income be what it will,

and so will be his family when he dies. This we see daily to be the case

of ecclesiastics, who, during their lives, are extremely well provided

for, only because they desire to maintain the honor of the cloth by

living like gentlemen, which would, perhaps, be better maintained by

living unlike them.

But, to return from so long a digression, to which the use of so

improper an epithet gave occasion, and to which the novelty of the

subject allured, I will make the reader amends by concisely telling

him that the captain poured forth such a torrent of abuse that I very

hastily and very foolishly resolved to quit the ship.

I gave immediate orders to summon a hoy to carry me that evening to

Dartmouth, without considering any consequence. Those orders I gave in

no very low voice, so that those above stairs might possibly conceive

there was more than one master in the cabin. In the same tone I likewise

threatened the captain with that which, he afterwards said, he feared

more than any rock or quicksand. Nor can we wonder at this when we are

told he had been twice obliged to bring to and cast anchor there before,

and had neither time escaped without the loss of almost his whole cargo.

The most distant sound of law thus frightened a man who had often, I am

convinced, heard numbers of cannon roar round him with intrepidity. Nor

did he sooner see the hoy approaching the vessel than he ran down again

into the cabin, and, his rage being perfectly subsided, he tumbled on

his knees, and a little too abjectly implored for mercy.

I did not suffer a brave man and an old man to remain a moment in this

posture, but I immediately forgave him.

And here, that I may not be thought the sly trumpeter of my own praises,

I do utterly disclaim all praise on the occasion. Neither did the

greatness of my mind dictate, nor the force of my Christianity exact,

this forgiveness. To speak truth, I forgave him from a motive which

would make men much more forgiving if they were much wiser than they

are, because it was convenient for me so to do.

Wednesday.--This morning the captain dressed himself in scarlet in order

to pay a visit to a Devonshire squire, to whom a captain of a ship is a

guest of no ordinary consequence, as he is a stranger and a gentleman,

who hath seen a great deal of the world in foreign parts, and knows all

the news of the times.

The squire, therefore, was to send his boat for the captain, but a most

unfortunate accident happened; for, as the wind was extremely rough and

against the hoy, while this was endeavoring to avail itself of great

seamanship in hauling up against the wind, a sudden squall carried off

sail and yard, or at least so disabled them that they were no longer of

any use and unable to reach the ship; but the captain, from the deck,

saw his hopes of venison disappointed, and was forced either to stay on

board his ship, or to hoist forth his own long-boat, which he could not

prevail with himself to think of, though the smell of the venison had

had twenty times its attraction. He did, indeed, love his ship as his

wife, and his boats as children, and never willingly trusted the latter,

poor things! to the dangers of the sea.

To say truth, notwithstanding the strict rigor with which he preserved

the dignity of his stations and the hasty impatience with which he

resented any affront to his person or orders, disobedience to which he

could in no instance brook in any person on board, he was one of

the best natured fellows alive. He acted the part of a father to his

sailors; he expressed great tenderness for any of them when ill, and

never suffered any the least work of supererogation to go unrewarded by

a glass of gin. He even extended his humanity, if I may so call it,

to animals, and even his cats and kittens had large shares in his

affections.

An instance of which we saw this evening, when the cat, which had shown

it could not be drowned, was found suffocated under a feather-bed in

the cabin. I will not endeavor to describe his lamentations with more

prolixity than barely by saying they were grievous, and seemed to have

some mixture of the Irish howl in them. Nay, he carried his fondness

even to inanimate objects, of which we have above set down a pregnant

example in his demonstration of love and tenderness towards his boats

and ship. He spoke of a ship which he had commanded formerly, and which

was long since no more, which he had called the Princess of Brazil, as a

widower of a deceased wife. This ship, after having followed the honest

business of carrying goods and passengers for hire many years, did at

last take to evil courses and turn privateer, in which service, to use

his own words, she received many dreadful wounds, which he himself had

felt as if they had been his own.

Thursday.--As the wind did not yesterday discover any purpose of

shifting, and the water in my belly grew troublesome and rendered me

short-breathed, I began a second time to have apprehensions of wanting

the assistance of a trochar when none was to be found; I therefore

concluded to be tapped again by way of precaution, and accordingly I

this morning summoned on board a surgeon from a neighboring parish, one

whom the captain greatly recommended, and who did indeed perform his

office with much dexterity. He was, I believe, likewise a man of great

judgment and knowledge in the profession; but of this I cannot speak

with perfect certainty, for, when he was going to open on the dropsy

at large and on the particular degree of the distemper under which I

labored, I was obliged to stop him short, for the wind was changed, and

the captain in the utmost hurry to depart; and to desire him, instead

of his opinion, to assist me with his execution. I was now once more

delivered from my burden, which was not indeed so great as I had

apprehended, wanting two quarts of what was let out at the last

operation.

While the surgeon was drawing away my water the sailors were drawing up

the anchor; both were finished at the same time; we unfurled our sails

and soon passed the Berry-head, which forms the mouth of the bay.

We had not however sailed far when the wind, which, had though with a

slow pace, kept us company about six miles, suddenly turned about, and

offered to conduct us back again; a favor which, though sorely against

the grain, we were obliged to accept.

Nothing remarkable happened this day; for as to the firm persuasion

of the captain that he was under the spell of witchcraft, I would not

repeat it too often, though indeed he repeated it an hundred times every

day; in truth, he talked of nothing else, and seemed not only to be

satisfied in general of his being bewitched, but actually to have fixed

with good certainty on the person of the witch, whom, had he lived in

the days of Sir Matthew Hale, he would have infallibly indicted, and

very possibly have hanged, for the detestable sin of witchcraft; but

that law, and the whole doctrine that supported it, are now out of

fashion; and witches, as a learned divine once chose to express himself,

are put down by act of parliament. This witch, in the captain's opinion,

was no other than Mrs. Francis of Ryde, who, as he insinuated, out of

anger to me for not spending more money in her house than she could

produce anything to exchange for, or ally pretense to charge for, had

laid this spell on his ship.

Though we were again got near our harbor by three in the afternoon, yet

it seemed to require a full hour or more before we could come to our

former place of anchoring, or berth, as the captain called it. On this

occasion we exemplified one of the few advantages which the travelers by

water have over the travelers by land. What would the latter often give

for the sight of one of those hospitable mansions where he is assured

THAT THERE IS GOOD ENTERTAINMENT FOR MAN AND HORSE; and where both may

consequently promise themselves to assuage that hunger which exercise is

so sure to raise in a healthy constitution.

At their arrival at this mansion how much happier is the state of the

horse than that of the master! The former is immediately led to

his repast, such as it is, and, whatever it is, he falls to it with

appetite. But the latter is in a much worse situation. His hunger,

however violent, is always in some degree delicate, and his food

must have some kind of ornament, or, as the more usual phrase is,

of dressing, to recommend it. Now all dressing requires time, and

therefore, though perhaps the sheep might be just killed before you

came to the inn, yet in cutting him up, fetching the joint, which the

landlord by mistake said he had in the house, from the butcher at two

miles' distance, and afterwards warming it a little by the fire, two

hours at least must be consumed, while hunger, for want of better food,

preys all the time on the vitals of the man.

How different was the case with us! we carried our provision, our

kitchen, and our cook with us, and we were at one and the same time

traveling on our road, and sitting down to a repast of fish, with which

the greatest table in London can scarce at any rate be supplied.

Friday.--As we were disappointed of our wind, and obliged to return back

the preceding evening, we resolved to extract all the good we could out

of our misfortune, and to add considerably to our fresh stores of

meat and bread, with which we were very indifferently provided when we

hurried away yesterday. By the captain's advice we likewise laid in some

stores of butter, which we salted and potted ourselves, for our use at

Lisbon, and we had great reason afterwards to thank him for his advice.

In the afternoon I persuaded my wife whom it was no easy matter for

me to force from my side, to take a walk on shore, whither the gallant

captain declared he was ready to attend her. Accordingly the ladies

set out, and left me to enjoy a sweet and comfortable nap after the

operation of the preceding day.

Thus we enjoyed our separate pleasures full three hours, when we met

again, and my wife gave the foregoing account of the gentleman whom I

have before compared to Axylus, and of his habitation, to both which she

had been introduced by the captain, in the style of an old friend and

acquaintance, though this foundation of intimacy seemed to her to be no

deeper laid than in an accidental dinner, eaten many years before, at

this temple of hospitality, when the captain lay wind-bound in the same

bay.

Saturday.--Early this morning the wind seemed inclined to change in our

favor. Our alert captain snatched its very first motion, and got under

sail with so very gentle a breeze that, as the tide was against him, he

recommended to a fishing boy to bring after him a vast salmon and some

other provisions which lay ready for him on shore.

Our anchor was up at six, and before nine in the morning we had doubled

the Berry-head, and were arrived off Dartmouth, having gone full three

miles in as many hours, in direct opposition to the tide, which only

befriended us out of our harbor; and though the wind was perhaps our

friend, it was so very silent, and exerted itself so little in our

favor, that, like some cool partisans, it was difficult to say whether

it was with us or against us. The captain, however, declared the former

to be the case during the whole three hours; but at last he perceived

his error, or rather, perhaps, this friend, which had hitherto wavered

in choosing his side, became now more determined. The captain then

suddenly tacked about, and, asserting that he was bewitched, submitted

to return to the place from whence he came. Now, though I am as free

from superstition as any man breathing, and never did believe in

witches, notwithstanding all the excellent arguments of my lord

chief-justice Hale in their favor, and long before they were put down by

act of parliament, yet by what power a ship of burden should sail three

miles against both wind and tide, I cannot conceive, unless there was

some supernatural interposition in the case; nay, could we admit that

the wind stood neuter, the difficulty would still remain. So that

we must of necessity conclude that the ship was either bewinded or

bewitched. The captain, perhaps, had another meaning. He imagined

himself, I believe, bewitched, because the wind, instead of persevering

in its change in his favor, for change it certainly did that morning,

should suddenly return to its favorite station, and blow him back

towards the bay. But, if this was his opinion, he soon saw cause to

alter; for he had not measured half the way back when the wind again

declared in his favor, and so loudly, that there was no possibility of

being mistaken. The orders for the second tack were given, and obeyed

with much more alacrity than those had been for the first. We were all

of us indeed in high spirits on the occasion; though some of us a little

regretted the good things we were likely to leave behind us by the

fisherman's neglect; I might give it a worse name, for he faithfully

promised to execute the commission, which he had had abundant

opportunity to do; but nautica fides deserves as much to be proverbial

as ever Punica fides could formerly have done. Nay, when we consider

that the Carthaginians came from the Phoenicians who are supposed to have

produced the first mariners, we may probably see the true reason of

the adage, and it may open a field of very curious discoveries to the

antiquarian.

We were, however, too eager to pursue our voyage to suffer anything we

left behind us to interrupt our happiness, which, indeed, many agreeable

circumstances conspired to advance. The weather was inexpressibly

pleasant, and we were all seated on the deck, when our canvas began to

swell with the wind. We had likewise in our view above thirty other sail

around us, all in the same situation. Here an observation occurred to

me, which, perhaps, though extremely obvious, did not offer itself

to every individual in our little fleet: when I perceived with what

different success we proceeded under the influence of a superior power

which, while we lay almost idle ourselves, pushed us forward on our

intended voyage, and compared this with the slow progress which we had

made in the morning, of ourselves, and without any such assistance,

I could not help reflecting how often the greatest abilities lie

wind-bound as it were in life; or, if they venture out and attempt to

beat the seas, they struggle in vain against wind and tide, and, if they

have not sufficient prudence to put back, are most probably cast away on

the rocks and quicksands which are every day ready to devour them.

It was now our fortune to set out melioribus avibus. The wind freshened

so briskly in our poop that the shore appeared to move from us as fast

as we did from the shore. The captain declared he was sure of a wind,

meaning its continuance; but he had disappointed us so often that he had

lost all credit. However, he kept his word a little better now, and we

lost sight of our native land as joyfully, at least, as it is usual to

regain it.

Sunday.--The next morning the captain told me he thought himself thirty

miles to the westward of Plymouth, and before evening declared that the

Lizard Point, which is the extremity of Cornwall, bore several leagues

to leeward. Nothing remarkable passed this day, except the captain's

devotion, who, in his own phrase, summoned all hands to prayers, which

were read by a common sailor upon deck, with more devout force and

address than they are commonly read by a country curate, and received

with more decency and attention by the sailors than are usually

preserved in city congregations. I am indeed assured, that if any such

affected disregard of the solemn office in which they were engaged, as

I have seen practiced by fine gentlemen and ladies, expressing a kind of

apprehension lest they should be suspected of being really in earnest

in their devotion, had been shown here, they would have contracted the

contempt of the whole audience. To say the truth, from what I observed

in the behavior of the sailors in this voyage, and on comparing it with

what I have formerly seen of them at sea and on shore, I am convinced

that on land there is nothing more idle and dissolute; in their own

element there are no persons near the level of their degree who live in

the constant practice of half so many good qualities.

They are, for much the greater part, perfect masters of their business,

and always extremely alert, and ready in executing it, without any

regard to fatigue or hazard. The soldiers themselves are not better

disciplined nor more obedient to orders than these whilst aboard;

they submit to every difficulty which attends their calling with

cheerfulness, and no less virtues and patience and fortitude are

exercised by them every day of their lives. All these good qualities,

however, they always leave behind them on shipboard; the sailor out of

water is, indeed, as wretched an animal as the fish out of water; for

though the former hath, in common with amphibious animals, the bare

power of existing on the land, yet if he be kept there any time he never

fails to become a nuisance. The ship having had a good deal of motion

since she was last under sail, our women returned to their sickness, and

I to my solitude; having, for twenty-four hours together, scarce opened

my lips to a single person. This circumstance of being shut up within

the circumference of a few yards, with a score of human creatures, with

not one of whom it was possible to converse, was perhaps so rare as

scarce ever to have happened before, nor could it ever happen to one

who disliked it more than myself, or to myself at a season when I wanted

more food for my social disposition, or could converse less wholesomely

and happily with my own thoughts. To this accident, which fortune opened

to me in the Downs, was owing the first serious thought which I ever

entertained of enrolling myself among the voyage-writers; some of the

most amusing pages, if, indeed, there be any which deserve that name,

were possibly the production of the most disagreeable hours which ever

haunted the author.

Monday.--At noon the captain took an observation, by which it appeared

that Ushant bore some leagues northward of us, and that we were just

entering the bay of Biscay. We had advanced a very few miles in this bay

before we were entirely becalmed: we furled our sails, as being of

no use to us while we lay in this most disagreeable situation, more

detested by the sailors than the most violent tempest: we were alarmed

with the loss of a fine piece of salt beef, which had been hung in

the sea to freshen it; this being, it seems, the strange property

of salt-water. The thief was immediately suspected, and presently

afterwards taken by the sailors. He was, indeed, no other than a huge

shark, who, not knowing when he was well off, swallowed another piece

of beef, together with a great iron crook on which it was hung, and by

which he was dragged into the ship. I should scarce have mentioned the

catching this shark, though so exactly conformable to the rules and

practice of voyage-writing, had it not been for a strange circumstance

that attended it. This was the recovery of the stolen beef out of the

shark's maw, where it lay unchewed and undigested, and whence, being

conveyed into the pot, the flesh, and the thief that had stolen it,

joined together in furnishing variety to the ship's crew.

During this calm we likewise found the mast of a large vessel, which the

captain thought had lain at least three years in the sea. It was stuck

all over with a little shell-fish or reptile, called a barnacle, and

which probably are the prey of the rockfish, as our captain calls it,

asserting that it is the finest fish in the world; for which we are

obliged to confide entirely to his taste; for, though he struck the fish

with a kind of harping-iron, and wounded him, I am convinced, to death,

yet he could not possess himself of his body; but the poor wretch

escaped to linger out a few hours with probably great torments.

In the evening our wind returned, and so briskly, that we ran upwards

of twenty leagues before the next day's [Tuesday's] observation, which

brought us to lat. 47 degrees 42'. The captain promised us a very speedy

passage through the bay; but he deceived us, or the wind deceived him,

for it so slackened at sunset, that it scarce carried us a mile in an

hour during the whole succeeding night.

Wednesday.--A gale struck up a little after sunrising, which carried us

between three and four knots or miles an hour. We were this day at noon

about the middle of the bay of Biscay, when the wind once more deserted

us, and we were so entirely becalmed, that we did not advance a mile in

many hours. My fresh-water reader will perhaps conceive no unpleasant

idea from this calm; but it affected us much more than a storm could

have done; for, as the irascible passions of men are apt to swell with

indignation long after the injury which first raised them is over, so

fared it with the sea. It rose mountains high, and lifted our poor ship

up and down, backwards and forwards, with so violent an emotion, that

there was scarce a man in the ship better able to stand than myself.

Every utensil in our cabin rolled up and down, as we should have rolled

ourselves, had not our chairs been fast lashed to the floor. In this

situation, with our tables likewise fastened by ropes, the captain and

myself took our meal with some difficulty, and swallowed a little of our

broth, for we spilt much the greater part. The remainder of our dinner

being an old, lean, tame duck roasted, I regretted but little the loss

of, my teeth not being good enough to have chewed it.

Our women, who began to creep out of their holes in the morning, retired

again within the cabin to their beds, and were no more heard of this

day, in which my whole comfort was to find by the captain's relation

that the swelling was sometimes much worse; he did, indeed, take this

occasion to be more communicative than ever, and informed me of such

misadventures that had befallen him within forty-six years at sea as

might frighten a very bold spirit from undertaking even the shortest

voyage. Were these, indeed, but universally known, our matrons of

quality would possibly be deterred from venturing their tender offspring

at sea; by which means our navy would lose the honor of many a young

commodore, who at twenty-two is better versed in maritime affairs than

real seamen are made by experience at sixty. And this may, perhaps,

appear the more extraordinary, as the education of both seems to be

pretty much the same; neither of them having had their courage tried by

Virgil's description of a storm, in which, inspired as he was, I doubt

whether our captain doth not exceed him. In the evening the wind, which

continued in the N.W., again freshened, and that so briskly that Cape

Finisterre appeared by this day's observation to bear a few miles to the

southward. We now indeed sailed, or rather flew, near ten knots an hour;

and the captain, in the redundancy of his good-humor, declared he would

go to church at Lisbon on Sunday next, for that he was sure of a

wind; and, indeed, we all firmly believed him. But the event again

contradicted him; for we were again visited by a calm in the evening.

But here, though our voyage was retarded, we were entertained with a

scene, which as no one can behold without going to sea, so no one can

form an idea of anything equal to it on shore. We were seated on the

deck, women and all, in the serenest evening that can be imagined. Not

a single cloud presented itself to our view, and the sun himself was the

only object which engrossed our whole attention. He did indeed set

with a majesty which is incapable of description, with which, while

the horizon was yet blazing with glory, our eyes were called off to the

opposite part to survey the moon, which was then at full, and which in

rising presented us with the second object that this world hath offered

to our vision. Compared to these the pageantry of theaters, or splendor

of courts, are sights almost below the regard of children. We did

not return from the deck till late in the evening; the weather being

inexpressibly pleasant, and so warm that even my old distemper perceived

the alteration of the climate. There was indeed a swell, but nothing

comparable to what we had felt before, and it affected us on the deck

much less than in the cabin.

Friday.--The calm continued till sun-rising, when the wind likewise

arose, but unluckily for us it came from a wrong quarter; it was S.S.E.,

which is that very wind which Juno would have solicited of Aeolus, had

Gneas been in our latitude bound for Lisbon.

The captain now put on his most melancholy aspect, and resumed his

former opinion that he was bewitched. He declared with great solemnity

that this was worse and worse, for that a wind directly in his teeth

was worse than no wind at all. Had we pursued the course which the wind

persuaded us to take we had gone directly for Newfoundland, if we had

not fallen in with Ireland in our way. Two ways remained to avoid

this; one was to put into a port of Galicia; the other, to beat to the

westward with as little sail as possible: and this was our captain's

election.

As for us, poor passengers, any port would have been welcome to us;

especially, as not only our fresh provisions, except a great number of

old ducks and fowls, but even our bread was come to an end, and nothing

but sea-biscuit remained, which I could not chew. So that now for the

first time in my life I saw what it was to want a bit of bread.

The wind however was not so unkind as we had apprehended; but, having

declined with the sun, it changed at the approach of the moon, and

became again favorable to us, though so gentle that the next day's

observation carried us very little to the southward of Cape Finisterre.

This evening at six the wind, which had been very quiet all day, rose

very high, and continuing in our favor drove us seven knots an hour.

This day we saw a sail, the only one, as I heard of, we had seen in

our whole passage through the bay. I mention this on account of what

appeared to me somewhat extraordinary. Though she was at such a distance

that I could only perceive she was a ship, the sailors discovered that

she was a snow, bound to a port in Galicia.

Sunday.--After prayers, which our good captain read on the deck with

an audible voice, and with but one mistake, of a lion for Elias, in

the second lesson for this day, we found ourselves far advanced in 42

degrees, and the captain declared we should sup off Porte. We had not

much wind this day; but, as this was directly in our favor, we made it

up with sail, of which we crowded all we had. We went only at the rate

of four miles an hour, but with so uneasy a motion, continuing rolling

from side to side, that I suffered more than I had done in our whole

voyage; my bowels being almost twisted out of my belly. However, the day

was very serene and bright, and the captain, who was in high spirits,

affirmed he had never passed a pleasanter at sea.

The wind continued so brisk that we ran upward of six knots an hour the

whole night.

Monday.--In the morning our captain concluded that he was got into

lat. 40 degrees, and was very little short of the Burlings, as they are

called in the charts. We came up with them at five in the afternoon,

being the first land we had distinctly seen since we left Devonshire.

They consist of abundance of little rocky islands, a little distant from

the shore, three of them only showing themselves above the water.

Here the Portuguese maintain a kind of garrison, if we may allow it that

name. It consists of malefactors, who are banished hither for a term,

for divers small offenses--a policy which they may have copied from

the Egyptians, as we may read in Diodorus Siculus. That wise people, to

prevent the corruption of good manners by evil communication, built a

town on the Red Sea, whither they transported a great number of their

criminals, having first set an indelible mark on them, to prevent their

returning and mixing with the sober part of their citizens. These

rocks lie about fifteen leagues northwest of Cape Roxent, or, as it

is commonly called, the Rock of Lisbon, which we passed early the next

morning. The wind, indeed, would have carried us thither sooner; but the

captain was not in a hurry, as he was to lose nothing by his delay.

Tuesday.--This is a very high mountain, situated on the northern side of

the mouth of the river Tajo, which, rising about Madrid, in Spain, and

soon becoming navigable for small craft, empties itself, after a long

course, into the sea, about four leagues below Lisbon.

On the summit of the rock stands a hermitage, which is now in the

possession of an Englishman, who was formerly master of a vessel trading

to Lisbon; and, having changed his religion and his manners, the latter

of which, at least, were none of the best, betook himself to this

place, in order to do penance for his sins. He is now very old, and hath

inhabited this hermitage for a great number of years, during which he

hath received some countenance from the royal family, and particularly

from the present queen dowager, whose piety refuses no trouble or

expense by which she may make a proselyte, being used to say that the

saving one soul would repay all the endeavors of her life. Here we

waited for the tide, and had the pleasure of surveying the face of the

country, the soil of which, at this season, exactly resembles an

old brick-kiln, or a field where the green sward is pared up and set

a-burning, or rather a smoking, in little heaps to manure the land. This

sight will, perhaps, of all others, make an Englishman proud of, and

pleased with, his own country, which in verdure excels, I believe,

every other country. Another deficiency here is the want of large trees,

nothing above a shrub being here to be discovered in the circumference

of many miles.

At this place we took a pilot on board, who, being the first Portuguese

we spoke to, gave us an instance of that religious observance which is

paid by all nations to their laws; for, whereas it is here a capital

offense to assist any person in going on shore from a foreign vessel

before it hath been examined, and every person in it viewed by the

magistrates of health, as they are called, this worthy pilot, for a very

small reward, rowed the Portuguese priest to shore at this place, beyond

which he did not dare to advance, and in venturing whither he had given

sufficient testimony of love for his native country.

We did not enter the Tajo till noon, when, after passing several old

castles and other buildings which had greatly the aspect of ruins, we

came to the castle of Bellisle, where we had a full prospect of Lisbon,

and were, indeed, within three miles of it.

Here we were saluted with a gun, which was a signal to pass no farther

till we had complied with certain ceremonies which the laws of this

country require to be observed by all ships which arrive in this port.

We were obliged then to cast anchor, and expect the arrival of the

officers of the customs, without whose passport no ship must proceed

farther than this place.

Here likewise we received a visit from one of those magistrates of

health before mentioned. He refused to come on board the ship till every

person in her had been drawn up on deck and personally viewed by him.

This occasioned some delay on my part, as it was not the work of a

minute to lift me from the cabin to the deck. The captain thought my

particular case might have been excused from this ceremony, and that

it would be abundantly sufficient if the magistrate, who was obliged

afterwards to visit the cabin, surveyed me there. But this did not

satisfy the magistrate's strict regard to his duty. When he was told

of my lameness, he called out, with a voice of authority, "Let him

be brought up," and his orders were presently complied with. He was,

indeed, a person of great dignity, as well as of the most exact fidelity

in the discharge of his trust. Both which are the more admirable as his

salary is less than thirty pounds English per annum.

Before a ship hath been visited by one of those magistrates no person

can lawfully go on board her, nor can any on board depart from her. This

I saw exemplified in a remarkable instance. The young lad whom I have

mentioned as one of our passengers was here met by his father, who, on

the first news of the captain's arrival, came from Lisbon to Bellisle

in a boat, being eager to embrace a son whom he had not seen for many

years. But when he came alongside our ship neither did the father dare

ascend nor the son descend, as the magistrate of health had not yet been

on board. Some of our readers will, perhaps, admire the great caution of

this policy, so nicely calculated for the preservation of this country

from all pestilential distempers. Others will as probably regard it as

too exact and formal to be constantly persisted in, in seasons of the

utmost safety, as well as in times of danger. I will not decide either

way, but will content myself with observing that I never yet saw or

heard of a place where a traveler had so much trouble given him at his

landing as here. The only use of which, as all such matters begin and

end in form only, is to put it into the power of low and mean fellows

to be either rudely officious or grossly corrupt, as they shall see

occasion to prefer the gratification of their pride or of their avarice.

Of this kind, likewise, is that power which is lodged with other

officers here, of taking away every grain of snuff and every leaf

of tobacco brought hither from other countries, though only for the

temporary use of the person during his residence here. This is executed

with great insolence, and, as it is in the hands of the dregs of the

people, very scandalously; for, under pretense of searching for tobacco

and snuff, they are sure to steal whatever they can find, insomuch that

when they came on board our sailors addressed us in the Covent-garden

language: "Pray, gentlemen and ladies, take care of your swords and

watches." Indeed, I never yet saw anything equal to the contempt and

hatred which our honest tars every moment expressed for these Portuguese

officers.

At Bellisle lies buried Catharine of Arragon, widow of prince Arthur,

eldest son of our Henry VII, afterwards married to, and divorced from

Henry VIII. Close by the church where her remains are deposited is

a large convent of Geronymites, one of the most beautiful piles of

building in all Portugal.

In the evening, at twelve, our ship, having received previous visits

from all the necessary parties, took the advantage of the tide, and

having sailed up to Lisbon cast anchor there, in a calm and moonshiny

night, which made the passage incredibly pleasant to the women, who

remained three hours enjoying it, whilst I was left to the cooler

transports of enjoying their pleasures at second-hand; and yet, cooler

as they may be, whoever is totally ignorant of such sensation is, at the

same time, void of all ideas of friendship.

Wednesday.--Lisbon, before which we now lay at anchor, is said to be

built on the same number of hills with old Rome; but these do not all

appear to the water; on the contrary, one sees from thence one vast high

hill and rock, with buildings arising above one another, and that in so

steep and almost perpendicular a manner, that they all seem to have but

one foundation.

As the houses, convents, churches, &c., are large, and all built with

white stone, they look very beautiful at a distance; but as you approach

nearer, and find them to want every kind of ornament, all idea of beauty

vanishes at once. While I was surveying the prospect of this city,

which bears so little resemblance to any other that I have ever seen, a

reflection occurred to me that, if a man was suddenly to be removed from

Palmyra hither, and should take a view of no other city, in how

glorious a light would the ancient architecture appear to him! and what

desolation and destruction of arts and sciences would he conclude had

happened between the several eras of these cities!

I had now waited full three hours upon deck for the return of my man,

whom I had sent to bespeak a good dinner (a thing which had been long

unknown to me) on shore, and then to bring a Lisbon chaise with him to

the seashore; but it seems the impertinence of the providore was not yet

brought to a conclusion. At three o'clock, when I was from emptiness,

rather faint than hungry, my man returned, and told me there was a new

law lately made that no passenger should set his foot on shore without

a special order from the providore, and that he himself would have

been sent to prison for disobeying it, had he not been protected as the

servant of the captain. He informed me likewise that the captain had

been very industrious to get this order, but that it was then the

providore's hour of sleep, a time when no man, except the king himself,

durst disturb him.

To avoid prolixity, though in a part of my narrative which may be more

agreeable to my reader than it was to me, the providore, having at last

finished his nap, dispatched this absurd matter of form, and gave me

leave to come, or rather to be carried, on shore.

What it was that gave the first hint of this strange law is not easy

to guess. Possibly, in the infancy of their defection, and before their

government could be well established, they were willing to guard

against the bare possibility of surprise, of the success of which bare

possibility the Trojan horse will remain for ever on record, as a great

and memorable example. Now the Portuguese have no walls to secure them,

and a vessel of two or three hundred tons will contain a much larger

body of troops than could be concealed in that famous machine, though

Virgil tells us (somewhat hyperbolically, I believe) that it was as big

as a mountain.

About seven in the evening I got into a chaise on shore, and was driven

through the nastiest city in the world, though at the same time one of

the most populous, to a kind of coffee-house, which is very pleasantly

situated on the brow of a hill, about a mile from the city, and hath

a very fine prospect of the river Tajo from Lisbon to the sea. Here we

regaled ourselves with a good supper, for which we were as well charged

as if the bill had been made on the Bath-road, between Newbury and

London.

And now we could joyfully say,

Egressi optata Troes potiuntur arena.

Therefore, in the words of Horace,

--hie Finis chartaeque viaeque.

End of 's Journal of A Voyage to Lisbon, by Henry Fielding