with it a quantity of ammunition, if he could get it, and so tofurnish us for new exploits; and, in the meantime, I resolved to get aquantity of gold and some jewels, which I had on board the great ship,and place them so that I might carry them off without notice as soon ashe came back; and so, according to William's directions, I left himto go the voyage, and I went on board the great ship, in which we hadindeed an immense treasure.
We waited no less than two months for William's return, and indeedI began to be very uneasy about William, sometimes thinking he hadabandoned me, and that he might have used the same artifice to haveengaged the other men to comply with him, and so they were gone awaytogether; and it was but three days before his return that I was justupon the point of resolving to go away to Madagascar, and give him over;but the old surgeon, who mimicked the Quaker and passed for the masterof the sloop at Surat, persuaded me against that, for which good adviceand apparent faithfulness in what he had been trusted with, I made him aparty to my design, and he proved very honest.
At length William came back, to our inexpressible joy, and brought agreat many necessary things with him; as, particularly, he brought sixtybarrels of powder, some iron shot, and about thirty ton of lead; alsohe brought a great deal of provisions; and, in a word, William gave mea public account of his voyage, in the hearing of whoever happened to beupon the quarter-deck, that no suspicions might be found about us.
After all was done, William moved that he might go up again, and thatI would go with him; named several things which we had on board that hecould not sell there; and, particularly, told us he had been obliged toleave several things there, the caravans being not come in; and that hehad engaged to come back again with goods.
This was what I wanted. The men were eager for his going, andparticularly because he told them they might load the sloop back withrice and provisions; but I seemed backward to going, when the oldsurgeon stood up and persuaded me to go, and with many arguments pressedme to it; as, particularly, if I did not go, there would be no order,and several of the men might drop away, and perhaps betray all the rest;and that they should not think it safe for the sloop to go again if Idid not go; and to urge me to it, he offered himself to go with me.
Upon these considerations I seemed to be over-persuaded to go, and allthe company seemed to be better satisfied when I had consented; and,accordingly, we took all the powder, lead, and iron out of the sloopinto the great ship, and all the other things that were for the ship'suse, and put in some bales of spices and casks or frails of cloves, inall about seven ton, and some other goods, among the bales of which Ihad conveyed all my private treasure, which, I assure you, was of nosmall value, and away I went.
At going off I called a council of all the officers in the ship toconsider in what place they should wait for me, and how long, and weappointed the ship to stay eight-and-twenty days at a little island onthe Arabian side of the Gulf, and that, if the sloop did not come inthat time, they should sail to another island to the west of that place,and wait there fifteen days more, and that then, if the sloop did notcome, they should conclude some accident must have happened, and therendezvous should be at Madagascar.
Being thus resolved, we left the ship, which both William and I, andthe surgeon, never intended to see any more. We steered directly for theGulf, and through to Bassorah, or Balsara. This city of Balsara liesat some distance from the place where our sloop lay, and the rivernot being very safe, and we but ill acquainted with it, having but anordinary pilot, we went on shore at a village where some merchants live,and which is very populous, for the sake of small vessels riding there.
Here we stayed and traded three or four days, landing all our bales andspices, and indeed the whole cargo that was of any considerable value,which we chose to do rather than go up immediately to Balsara till theproject we had laid was put in execution.
After we had bought several goods, and were preparing to buy severalothers, the boat being on shore with twelve men, myself, William, thesurgeon, and one fourth man, whom we had singled out, we contrivedto send a Turk just at the dusk of the evening with a letter to theboatswain, and giving the fellow a charge to run with all possiblespeed, we stood at a small distance to observe the event. The contentsof the letter were thus written by the old doctor:--
"BOATSWAIN THOMAS,--We are all betrayed. For God's sake make off withthe boat, and get on board, or you are all lost. The captain, Williamthe Quaker, and George the reformade are seized and carried away: I amescaped and hid, but cannot stir out; if I do I am a dead man. Assoon as you are on board cut or slip, and make sail for your lives.Adieu.--R.S."
We stood undiscovered, as above, it being the dusk of the evening, andsaw the Turk deliver the letter, and in three minutes we saw all the menhurry into the boat and put off, and no sooner were they on board thanthey took the hint, as we supposed, for the next morning they were outof sight, and we never heard tale or tidings of them since.
We were now in a good place, and in very good circumstances, for wepassed for merchants of Persia.
It is not material to record here what a mass of ill-gotten wealth wehad got together: it will be more to the purpose to tell you that Ibegan to be sensible of the crime of getting of it in such a manner asI had done; that I had very little satisfaction in the possession ofit; and, as I told William, I had no expectation of keeping it, nor muchdesire; but, as I said to him one day walking out into the fields nearthe town of Bassorah, so I depended upon it that it would be the case,which you will hear presently.
We were perfectly secured at Bassorah, by having frighted away therogues, our comrades; and we had nothing to do but to consider how toconvert our treasure into things proper to make us look like merchants,as we were now to be, and not like freebooters, as we really had been.
We happened very opportunely here upon a Dutchman, who had travelledfrom Bengal to Agra, the capital city of the Great Mogul, and fromthence was come to the coast of Malabar by land, and got shipping,somehow or other, up the Gulf; and we found his design was to go up thegreat river to Bagdad or Babylon, and so, by the caravan, to Aleppo andScanderoon. As William spoke Dutch, and was of an agreeable, insinuatingbehaviour, he soon got acquainted with this Dutchman, and discoveringour circumstances to one another, we found he had considerable effectswith him; and that he had traded long in that country, and was makinghomeward to his own country; and that he had servants with him; one anArmenian, whom he had taught to speak Dutch, and who had something ofhis own, but had a mind to travel into Europe; and the other a Dutchsailor, whom he had picked up by his fancy, and reposed a great trust inhim, and a very honest fellow he was.
This Dutchman was very glad of an acquaintance, because he soon foundthat we directed our thoughts to Europe also; and as he found we wereencumbered with goods only (for we let him know nothing of our money),he readily offered us his assistance to dispose of as many of them asthe place we were in would put off, and his advice what to do with therest.
While this was doing, William and I consulted what to do with ourselvesand what we had; and first, we resolved we would never talk seriouslyof our measures but in the open fields, where we were sure nobody couldhear; so every evening, when the sun began to decline and the air to bemoderate we walked out, sometimes this way, sometimes that, to consultof our affairs.
I should have observed that we had new clothed ourselves here, afterthe Persian manner, with long vests of silk, a gown or robe of Englishcrimson cloth, very fine and handsome, and had let our beards grow soafter the Persian manner that we passed for Persian merchants, in viewonly, though, by the way, we could not understand or speak one word ofthe language of Persia, or indeed of any other but English and Dutch;and of the latter I understood very little.
However, the Dutchman supplied all this for us; and as we had resolvedto keep ourselves as retired as we could, though there were severalEnglish merchants upon the place, yet we never acquainted ourselves withone of them, or exchanged a word with them; by which means we preventedtheir inquiry of us now, or
their giving any intelligence of us, if anynews of our landing here should happen to come, which, it was easy forus to know, was possible enough, if any of our comrades fell into badhands, or by many accidents which we could not foresee.
It was during my being here, for here we stayed near two months, thatI grew very thoughtful about my circumstances; not as to the danger,neither indeed were we in any, but were entirely concealed andunsuspected; but I really began to have other thoughts of myself, and ofthe world, than ever I had before.
William had struck so deep into my unthinking temper with hinting to methat there was something beyond all this; that the present time was thetime of enjoyment, but that the time of account approached; that thework that remained was gentler than the labour past, viz., repentance,and that it was high time to think of it;--I say these, and suchthoughts as these, engrossed my hours, and, in a word, I grew very sad.
As to the wealth I had, which was immensely great, it was all like dirtunder my