The Life, Adventures & Piracies of the Famous Captain Singleton

all much ado to keep our second lieutenant frommurdering some of them, to make them tell. What if they had told? He didnot understand one word of it; but he would not be persuaded but thatthe negroes must needs understand him when he asked them whether theship had any boat or no, like ours, and what was become of it.

  But there was no remedy but to wait till we made these people understandEnglish, and to adjourn the story till that time. The case was thus:where they were taken on board the ship, that we could never understand,because they never knew the English names which we give to those coasts,or what nation they were who belonged to the ship, because they knew notone tongue from another; but thus far the negro I examined, who was thesame whose leg William had cured, told us, that they did not speak thesame language as we spoke, nor the same our Portuguese spoke; so that inall probability they must be French or Dutch.

  Then he told us that the white men used them barbarously; that they beatthem unmercifully; that one of the negro men had a wife and two negrochildren, one a daughter, about sixteen years old; that a white manabused the negro man's wife, and afterwards his daughter, which, as hesaid, made all the negro men mad; and that the woman's husband was in agreat rage; at which the white man was so provoked that he threatenedto kill him; but, in the night, the negro man, being loose, got a greatclub, by which he made us understand he meant a handspike, and that whenthe same Frenchman (if it was a Frenchman) came among them again, hebegan again to abuse the negro man's wife, at which the negro, taking upthe handspike, knocked his brains out at one blow; and then taking thekey from him with which he usually unlocked the handcuffs which thenegroes were fettered with, he set about a hundred of them at liberty,who, getting up upon the deck by the same scuttle that the white mencame down, and taking the man's cutlass who was killed, and laying holdof what came next them, they fell upon the men that were upon thedeck, and killed them all, and afterwards those they found upon theforecastle; that the captain and his other men, who were in the cabinand the round-house, defended themselves with great courage, and shotout at the loopholes at them, by which he and several other men werewounded, and some killed; but that they broke into the round-house aftera long dispute, where they killed two of the white men, but owned thatthe two white men killed eleven of their men before they could breakin; and then the rest, having got down the scuttle into the great cabin,wounded three more of them.

  That, after this, the gunner of the ship having secured himself in thegun-room, one of his men hauled up the long-boat close under the stern,and putting into her all the arms and ammunition they could come at, gotall into the boat, and afterwards took in the captain, and those thatwere with him, out of the great cabin. When they were all thus embarked,they resolved to lay the ship aboard again, and try to recover it. Thatthey boarded the ship in a desperate manner, and killed at first allthat stood in their way; but the negroes being by this time all loose,and having gotten some arms, though they understood nothing of powderand bullet, or guns, yet the men could never master them. However, theylay under the ship's bow, and got out all the men they had left in thecook-room, who had maintained themselves there, notwithstanding all thenegroes could do, and with their small-arms killed between thirty andforty of the negroes, but were at last forced to leave them.

  They could give me no account whereabouts this was, whether near thecoast of Africa, or far off, or how long it was before the ship fellinto our hands; only, in general, it was a great while ago, as theycalled it; and, by all we could learn, it was within two or three daysafter they had set sail from the coast. They told us that they hadkilled about thirty of the white men, having knocked them on the headwith crows and handspikes, and such things as they could get; and onestrong negro killed three of them with an iron crow, after he was shottwice through the body; and that he was afterwards shot through thehead by the captain himself at the door of the round-house, which he hadsplit open with the crow; and this we supposed was the occasion of thegreat quantity of blood which we saw at the round-house door.

  The same negro told us that they threw all the powder and shot theycould find into the sea, and they would have thrown the great guns intothe sea if they could have lifted them. Being asked how they cameto have their sails in such a condition, his answer was, "They nounderstand; they no know what the sails do;" that was, they did not somuch as know that it was the sails that made the ship go, or understandwhat they meant, or what to do with them. When we asked him whither theywere going, he said they did not know, but believed they should go hometo their own country again. I asked him, in particular, what he thoughtwe were when we first came up with them? He said they were terriblyfrighted, believing we were the same white men that had gone away intheir boats, and were come again in a great ship, with the two boatswith them, and expected they would kill them all.

  This was the account we got out of them, after we had taught themto speak English, and to understand the names and use of the thingsbelonging to the ship which they had occasion to speak of; and weobserved that the fellows were too innocent to dissemble in theirrelation, and that they all agreed in the particulars, and were alwaysin the same story, which confirmed very much the truth of what theysaid.

  Having taken this ship, our next difficulty was, what to do with thenegroes. The Portuguese in the Brazils would have bought them all of us,and been glad of the purchase, if we had not showed ourselves enemiesthere, and been known for pirates; but, as it was, we durst not goashore anywhere thereabouts, or treat with any of the planters, becausewe should raise the whole country upon us; and, if there were any suchthings as men-of-war in any of their ports, we should be as sure to beattacked by them, and by all the force they had by land or sea.

  Nor could we think of any better success if we went northward to our ownplantations. One while we determined to carry them all away to BuenosAyres, and sell them there to the Spaniards; but they were really toomany for them to make use of; and to carry them round to the South Seas,which was the only remedy that was left, was so far that we should be noway able to subsist them for so long a voyage.

  At last, our old, never-failing friend, William, helped us out again, ashe had often done at a dead lift. His proposal was this, that he shouldgo as master of the ship, and about twenty men, such as we could besttrust, and attempt to trade privately, upon the coast of Brazil, withthe planters, not at the principal ports, because that would not beadmitted.

  We all agreed to this, and appointed to go away ourselves towards theRio de la Plata, where we had thought of going before, and to wait forhim, not there, but at Port St Pedro, as the Spaniards call it, lyingat the mouth of the river which they call Rio Grande, and where theSpaniards had a small fort and a few people, but we believe there wasnobody in it.

  Here we took up our station, cruising off and on, to see if we couldmeet any ships going to or coming from the Buenos Ayres or the Rio dela Plata; but we met with nothing worth notice. However, we employedourselves in things necessary for our going off to sea; for we filledall our water-casks, and got some fish for our present use, to spare asmuch as possible our ship's stores.

  William, in the meantime, went away to the north, and made the landabout the Cape de St Thomas; and betwixt that and the isles De Tuberonhe found means to trade with the planters for all his negroes, as wellthe women as the men, and at a very good price too; for William, whospoke Portuguese pretty well, told them a fair story enough, that theship was in scarcity of provisions, that they were driven a great wayout of their way, and indeed, as we say, out of their knowledge, andthat they must go up to the northward as far as Jamaica, or sell thereupon the coast. This was a very plausible tale, and was easily believed;and, if you observe the manner of the negroes' sailing, and whathappened in their voyage, was every word of it true.

  By this method, and being true to one another, William passed for whathe was--I mean, for a very honest fellow; and by the assistance of oneplanter, who sent to some of his neighbour planters, and managed thetrade among themselves, he got a quick market; for in l
ess than fiveweeks William sold all his negroes, and at last sold the ship itself,and shipped himself and his twenty men, with two negro boys whom he hadleft, in a sloop, one of those which the planters used to send on boardfor the negroes. With this sloop Captain William, as we then called him,came away, and found us at Port St Pedro, in the latitude of 32 degrees30 minutes south.

  Nothing was more surprising to us than to see a sloop come along thecoast, carrying Portuguese colours, and come in directly to us, after wewere assured he had discovered both our ships. We fired a gun, upon hernearer approach, to bring her to an anchor, but immediately she firedfive guns by way of salute, and spread her English ancient. Then webegan to guess it was friend William, but wondered what was the meaningof his being in a sloop, whereas we sent him away in a ship of near 300tons; but he soon let us into the whole history of his management, withwhich we had a great deal of reason to be very well satisfied. As soonas he