they not only served us faithfully--the more so as we treated them
without harshness--but were of great help in showing us the way, and in
conversing with the savages we afterwards met.

When we reached the country where the gold was, we at once agreed, in
order that the good harmony and friendship of our company might be
maintained, that however much gold was gotten, it should be brought into
one common stock, and equally divided at last, the negroes sharing with
the rest.

This was done, and at the end of our long journey we found each man's
share amounted to many pounds of gold. We also got a cargo of elephants'
teeth.

We parted at the Gold Coast from our black companions on the best of
terms. Then most of my comrades went off to the Portuguese factories
near Gambia, and I went to Cape Coast Castle, and got passage for,
England, where I arrived in September.


_III.--Quaker and Pirate_


I had neither friend nor relation in England, though it was my native
country; I had not a person to trust with what I had, or to counsel me
to secure or save it; but falling into ill company, and trusting the
keeper of a public-house in Rotherhithe with a great part of my money,
all that great sum, which I got with so much pains and hazard, was gone
in little more than two years' time--spent in all kinds of folly and
wickedness.