it was to be set on shore in a strange country; and if the
Portuguese captain that took me up at sea had served me so, and
taken all I had for my deliverance, I must have been starved, or
have been as much a slave at the Brazils as I had been at Barbary,
the mere being sold to a Mahometan excepted; and perhaps a
Portuguese is not a much better master than a Turk, if not in some
cases much worse.

I therefore told the French captain that we had taken them up in
their distress, it was true, but that it was our duty to do so, as
we were fellow-creatures; and we would desire to be so delivered if
we were in the like or any other extremity; that we had done
nothing for them but what we believed they would have done for us
if we had been in their case and they in ours; but that we took
them up to save them, not to plunder them; and it would be a most
barbarous thing to take that little from them which they had saved
out of the fire, and then set them on shore and leave them; that
this would be first to save them from death, and then kill them
ourselves: save them from drowning, and abandon them to starving;
and therefore I would not let the least thing be taken from them.
As to setting them on shore, I told them indeed that was an
exceeding difficulty to us, for that the ship was bound to the East
Indies; and though we were driven out of our course to the westward
a very great way, and perhaps were directed by Heaven on purpose
for their deliverance, yet it was impossible for us wilfully to
change our voyage on their particular account; nor could my nephew,
the captain, answer it to the freighters, with whom he was under
charter to pursue his voyage by way of Brazil; and all I knew we
could do for them was to put ourselves in the way of meeting with
other ships homeward bound from the West Indies, and get them a