Now this advice assorting so well with my inclination, I made haste to follow it, to the extent even of sending in my resignation of my place to Mr President and the Council, and calling in such moneys as I had that I did not design to leave in Mr Martin’s hands. Three days after this sudden determination of mine, the Boscobel did cast anchor in Swally Road, and up come Captain Freeman to the Factory, much moved by the prospect of having my company on his voyage home. ’Twas his last voyage also, says he, for he was growing old, and might no longer depend on his bodily strength in any strait, as he had once done, and therefore he was minded to ask a decent pension from the Company, and with his savings build him a likely house by the riverside down Deptford way, and live there with his old wife, laying down the law to the younger skippers, and shaking his head with the old ones over the new-fangled ways favoured by the officers of his majesty’s dockyard. And here, said he, must I come to visit upon him, and we would smoke a pipe together in an arbour by the water, with the smell of tar and rope all about us, and talk of our former voyages in the Eastern Seas the while we watched the king’s ships floating down with the tide. And I was well pleased to humour my old friend in this simple dream of his, so that we spake on’t many an evening on deck during our voyage. For I was able to make an end of all my occasions before the ship sailed, and therefore embarked in her, with Loll Duss my servant, and many great chests and boxes filled with precious merchandises and strange toys[134] that I had lit upon in my travels. Thus, then, did I bid farewell to that most rich and pleasant town of Surat, and to my fellow-servants of the Company there, that had showed themselves, with scarce any exception, as genteel and agreeable persons as any man need desire for his fellows. And I am right glad now that I departed from East India before this famous city lost her pre-eminence in our trade, the which was given over to that low and sultry island of Bombaim, to the great scandal of all in the Factory. But this, as I have said, happened only after I had left the place.