could persuade himself to suppress.

For his labours he claims no credit beyond what may be due to the
strictest fidelity in his narrative. It was not a romance that he had to
give to the world; nor has he gone out of the track that actual
circumstances prepared for him, to furnish food for sickly minds, by
fictitious relations of adventures that never happened, but which are by
a certain description of readers perused with avidity, and not
unfrequently considered as the only passages deserving of notice.

Though to a work of this nature a style ornamental and luxuriant would
have been evidently inapplicable, yet the author has not been wholly
inattentive to this particular, but has endeavoured to temper the dry and
formal manner of the mere journalist, with something of the historian's
ease. Long sequestered, however, from literary society, and from
convenient access to books, he had no other models than those which
memory could supply; and therefore does not presume to think his volume
proof against the rigid censor: but to liberal criticism he submits, with
the confidence of a man conscious of having neither negligence nor
presumption to impute to himself. He wrote to beguile the tedium of many
a heavy hour; and when he wrote looked not beyond the satisfaction which
at some future period might be afforded to a few friends, as well as to
his own mind, by a review of those hardships which in common with his
colleagues he had endured and overcome; hardships which in some degree he
supposes to be inseparable from the first establishment of any colony;
but to which, from the peculiar circumstances and description of the
settlers in this instance, were attached additional difficulties.

In the progress of his not unpleasing task, the author began to think
that his labours might prove interesting beyond the small circle of his