I knew this must be the young woman who was his mother's servant, for
there was no other Christian woman on the island: so I began to persuade
him not to do anything of that kind rashly, or because he found himself
in this solitary circumstance. I represented to him that he had some
considerable substance in the world, and good friends, as I understood by
himself, and the maid also; that the maid was not only poor, and a
servant, but was unequal to him, she being six or seven and twenty years
old, and he not above seventeen or eighteen; that he might very probably,
with my assistance, make a remove from this wilderness, and come into his
own country again; and that then it would be a thousand to one but he
would repent his choice, and the dislike of that circumstance might be
disadvantageous to both. I was going to say more, but he interrupted me,
smiling, and told me, with a great deal of modesty, that I mistook in my
guesses--that he had nothing of that kind in his thoughts; and he was
very glad to hear that I had an intent of putting them in a way to see
their own country again; and nothing should have made him think of
staying there, but that the voyage I was going was so exceeding long and
hazardous, and would carry him quite out of the reach of all his friends;
that he had nothing to desire of me but that I would settle him in some
little property in the island where he was, give him a servant or two,
and some few necessaries, and he would live here like a planter, waiting
the good time when, if ever I returned to England, I would redeem him. He
hoped I would not be unmindful of him when I came to England: that he
would give me some letters to his friends in London, to let them know how
good I had been to him, and in what part of the world and what
circumstances I had left him in: and he promised me that whenever I
redeemed him, the plantation, and all the improvements he had made upon
it, let the value be what it would, should be wholly mine.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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