near my unhappy fate, to lose my time and spend my youth, as it were, for nothing in such a cursed place as this, and not see a likelihood of getting out of it, but that I must end my days here. To prevent all which, I hope that they and you, in their behalf, will use your utmost endeavours, by such means as are requisite, for my deliverance, which I shall very impatiently pray to God to bring to pass. Governor Baldwin promised me in his last, upon his arrival in London, he would lay my case before our royal masters. Therefore, when you, write, I beg you will remind him and them thereof, and note the contents of what I now write. If any letters come from England for me, I believe either them or anything else will come safe to my hands by the king’s people. He is very willing I should have letters come to me, or anything else. Nor will he be guilty of any mean action in keeping anything from me, if it were twenty slaves. Neither do I believe he would detain any white man that should come here, but me whom he deems a captive taken in his wars. He sets a great value upon me, he never having had a white man here before, only an old mulatto Portuguese, which he had bought of the Popoe people, at the rate of about £500, as near as I could compute. And though this white man is his slave, he keeps him like a great carboceer, and has given him two houses, and a heap of wives and servants. It may be that once in two or three months he mends (he being a tailor by trade) some trifle or other for his majesty, but after the devil of a manner. So that if any tailor, carpenter, smith, or any sort of white man that is free, be willing to come here, he will find very good encouragement, and be much caressed, and get money if he can be contented with his life for a time; his majesty paying everybody extravagantly that works for him. And then it might be one means of letting me go with a promise of returning to trade with him; but he now says, if I go, he does not know whether he shall see any more white men, thinking they add to his grandeur; so that if any fellow whatsoever comes up and goes down again, it will possess him with a notion that more white men will come, and so let me go in order to encourage their coming. Or, if my little servant, Henry Tench, he at Whydah, and is willing to come to me, it may in time be much for his interest, as now being a boy, the king will be entirely fond of him, for, though I do nothing for him, he has put me into a house and given me half-a-dozen men and women servants, also a constant supply to maintain myself and them. If I loved brandy, I might soon kill myself, having enough of that, also of sugar, flour, and the like. And when he kills oxen, which is often, I am sure of a quarter, and sometimes a live hog, sheep, or goat; so that I