I immediately offered all I had to the captain of the ship as a return for my deliverance, but he told me he would take nothing from me. All I had should be delivered safe to me when I came to the Brasils.
"For," said he, "I have saved your life on no other terms than I would be glad to be saved myself. Besides," continued Captain Amaral, for that was his name, "when I carry you to the Brasils, if I should take from you what you have, you will be starved there, and then I only take away that life I have given. No, no, Seignior Inglese," (Mr. Englishman,) said he, "I will carry you thither in charity, and these things will help to buy your subsistence there and your passage home again."
As he was charitable in this proposal, so he was just in the performance. He ordered the seamen that none should offer to touch any thing I had. Then he took every thing into his own possession and gave me back an exact inventory of them, that I might have them, even so much as my three earthen jars.
As to my boat, it was a very good one, he saw, and told me he would buy it of me for the ship's use and asked me what I would have for it. I told him he had been so generous to me in every thing I could not offer to make any price of the boat, but left it to him, upon which he told me he would give me a note of hand to pay me eighty pieces of eight for it at Brasil. When it came there, if any one offered to give more, he would make it up.
Captain Amaral offer’d me also sixty pieces of eight more for my boy Xury. I was very loth to sell the poor boy's liberty who had assisted me so faithfully in procuring my own. Alas, the boy still often stair'd at me in fear, and had seem'd much relieved at the sight of other men, even those not of his kind. However, the captain offered me this medium, that he would give the boy an obligation to set him free in ten years, if he turned Christian. Upon my savior's kind nature, and Xury saying he was most willing to go to him, I let the captain have him.
My fortunes reverse, my plantation,
my foolishness
We had a very good voyage to the Brasils, and arrived in the Bay de Todos los Santos, or All Saints' Bay, in about twenty-two days, and two before the first night of the moon. Xury had tried numerous times to tell his new master and the crew of the beast within my skin, but his poor slave's English allow'd me to brush aside his words as those of a small boy scared by the creatures of Africk. I was once more delivered from the most miserable of all conditions of life, and what to do next with myself I was now to consider.
The generous treatment Captain Amaral gave me I can never enough remember. He would take nothing of me for my passage, gave me forty ducats for the lion's skin which I had in my boat, and caused every thing I had in the ship to be delivered to me. What I was willing to sell, he bought of me. In a word, I made about two hundred and twenty pieces of eight of all my cargo, and with this stock I went on shore in the Brasils.
I had not been long here before I was recommended to the house of a good honest man who had an ingeino as they call it, that is, a plantation and a sugar-house. I lived with him some time and acquainted myself with the manner of planting and making of sugar. Seeing how well the planters lived, I resolv’d that if I could get a license to settle there, I would turn planter among them, endeavouring, in the mean time, to find out some way to get my money, which I had left in London, remitted to me. To this purpose, I purchased as much land as my money would reach and formed a plan for my plantation and settlement.
I had a neighbour, a Portuguese of Lisbon, but born of English parents, whose name was Wells, and in much such circumstances as I was. My stock was but low, as well as his. We rather planted for food than any thing else for about two years, and oft did he ignore the howls and roars that came from my estate at the time of the full moon. However, we began to increase and our land began to come into order. The third year we planted some tobacco, and made each of us a large piece of ground ready for planting canes in the year to come. But we both wanted help.
I was, in some degree, settled in my measures for carrying on the plantation before my kind friend, Captain Amaral, went back to England. When telling him what little stock I had left behind me in London, he gave me this friendly and sincere advice.