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decks, who immediately fell to cutting and hacking the decks and rigging. We plied them with small shot, half-pikes, powder chests, and such like, and cleared our deck of them twice. However, to cut short this melancholy part of our story, our ship being disabled, and three of our men killed and eight wounded, we were obliged to yield, and were carried all prisoners into Sallee, a port belonging to the Moors.
    The usage I had there was not so dreadful as at first I apprehended, nor was I carried up the country to the emperor’s court, as the rest of our men were, but was kept by the captain of the rover, as his proper prize, and made his slave, being young and nimble and fit for his business. At this surprising change of my circumstances, from a merchant to a miserable slave, I was perfectly overwhelmed; and now I looked back upon my father’s prophetic discourse to me, that I should be miserable and have none to relieve me, which I thought was now so effectually brought to pass that I could not be worse; that now the hand of Heaven had overtaken me, and I was undone without redemption. But alas! this was but a taste of the misery I was to go through, as will appear in the sequel of this story.
    As my new patron, or master, had taken me home to his house, so I was in hopes that he would take me with him when he went to sea again, believing that it would some time or other be his fate to be taken by a Spanish or Portugal man-of-war; and that then I should be set at liberty. But this hope of mine was soon taken away; for when he went to sea, he left me on shore to look after his little garden and do the common drudgery of slaves about his house; and when he came home again from his cruise, he ordered me to lie in the cabin to look after the ship.
    Here I meditated nothing but my escape, and what method I might take to effect it; but found no way that had the least probability in it. Nothing presented to make the supposition of it rational; for I had nobody to communicate it to, that would embark with me, no fellow slave, no Englishman, Irishman, or Scotsman there but myself; so that for two years, though I often pleased myself with the imagination, yet I never had the least encouraging prospect of putting it in practice.
    After about two years an odd circumstance presented itself, which put the old thought of making some attempt for my liberty again in my head. My patron lying at home longer than usual without fitting out his ship, which, as I heard, was for want of money, he used constantly once or twice a week, sometimes oftener if the weather was fair, to take the ship’s pinnace and go out into the road a-fishing; and as he always took me and a young Maresco with him to row the boat, we made him very merry, and I proved very dexterous in catching fish; insomuch that sometimes he would send me with a Moor, one of his kinsmen, and the youth, the Maresco, as they called him, to catch a dish of fish for him.
    It happened one time that, going a-fishing in a stark calm morning, a fog rose so thick that, though we were not half a league from the shore, we lost sight of it; and rowing we knew not whither or which way, we laboured all day and all the next night; and when the morning came, we found we had pulled off to sea instead of pulling in for the shore; and that we were at least two leagues from the shore. However, we got well in again, though with a great deal of labour and some danger; for the wind began to blow pretty fresh in the morning; but particularly we were all very hungry.
    But our patron, warned by this disaster, resolved to take more care of himself for the future; and having lying by him the longboat of our English ship which he had taken, he resolved he would not go a-fishing any more without a compass and some provision; so he ordered the carpenter of his ship, who also was an English slave, to build a little stateroom or cabin in the middle of the longboat, like that of a barge, with a place to stand behind