After being discharged from duty, and while at their mess, John Scott and John Clark were invited to join another mess and take grog. The proposal was then made to Clark and his messmate, to obtain their liberty that night by swimming to James’ Island, it being from one and a-half to two miles distant. The plan was arranged by Clark to strip in the bow of the ship, all but their trowsers, and swim at first straight ahead in a quartering direction, until they could no longer be seen from the ship, and then turn in the course of the island. He was chosen to take the lead, and he dashed ahead in the direction he had chosen. The others made some delay, as Clark was to turn on his back and wait for them. He found, on trial, the salt water so dashed over his face, that he was compelled to swim for his life. His situation became extremely perilous; the rippling waves dashed in his face and he began to despair of life. And now he became alarmed at the prospect of immediate death, and his sins rushed on his conscience to that degree that even in the perilous condition he was, he dared not to pray for deliverance. The prayers of his mother seemed to ring in his ears, and in his disturbed imagination the spray that beat upon his face were her scalding tears. Like flashes of lightning his sins pierced his conscience, and the terrors of the law, like peals of thunder, rolled over his sinking soul. Such were his views of his sin and guilt, while swimming for his life, that he dared not pray, lest his cries to heaven for mercy should provoke the vengeance of an angry God to sink him in the deep. But let him tell his own experience from his journal at this terrible crisis. “I expected to launch into the presence of a frowning and sin-avenging God, whose tender mercies for many years I had trampled under my ungodly feet;--I had broken many promises of amendment;--a yawning hell seemed moving from beneath, at the ocean’s depth, to meet me on my sinking. Human language cannot express the agitation of my mind, and such was my perturbation for a time, that my strength failed me to such a degree that I could hardly keep myself from sinking. I would willingly have sunk, but the thought of dying without the hope of mercy, was so terrible that I resolved to swim as long as I could keep my head above water, or until deprived of my senses, or till some greedy shark, of which the harbor was never clear, should devour me, and put an end to my struggling.”