Then shortly comes a dismal transition from strange providences in the wood, and enchanting visions beneath the waves, to the singularly severe sufferings of a seafaring life. The ships in that day have left a grim and ugly reputation surviving still. The term “sea-devil” has often been used as descriptive of the masters of ships in that time. Silas seems to have sailed under some of the worst specimens of this order. About the age of fourteen he was bound apprentice to Captain Moses Lilly, and started for his first voyage from Bristol to Jamaica. “Here,” he says, “I may date my first sufferings.” He says the first of his afflictions “was sea-sickness, which held me till my arrival in Jamaica;” and considering that it was a voyage of fourteen weeks, it was a fair spell of entertainment from that pleasant companion. They were short of water, they were put on short allowance of food, and when having obtained their freight, while lying in Kingston harbour, their vessel, and seventy-six sail of ships, many of them very large, but all riding with three anchors ahead, were all scattered by an astonishing hurricane, and all the vessels in Port Royal shared the same fate. He tells how the corpses of the drowned sailors strewed the shores, and how, immediately after the subsidence of the hurricane, a pestilential sickness swept away thousands of the natives. “Every morning,” he says, “I have observed between thirty and forty corpses carried past my window; being very near death myself, I expected every day to approach with the messenger of my dissolution.” During this time he appears to have been lying in a warehouse, with no person to take care of him except a negro, who every day brought to him, where he was laid in his hammock, Jesuit’s bark.