A very pleasant captain, this seems, to have sailed with; but poor Silas had very little of his company. However, the good captain and his boatswain put their experiences together, and the poor boy was restored to health, and after some singular adventures he reached Bristol. Arriving there, however, Captain Lilly transferred him to a Captain Timothy Tucker, of whom Silas bears the pleasing testimony, “A greater villain, I firmly believe, never existed, although at home he assumed the character and temper of a saint.” The wretch actually stole a white woman from her own country to sell her to the black prince of Bonny, on the African coast. They had not been long at sea before this delightful person gave Silas a taste of his temper. Thinking the boy had taken too much bread from the cask, he went to the cabin and brought back with him his large horsewhip, “and exercised it,” says Silas, “about my body in so unmerciful a manner, that not only the clothes on my back were cut to pieces, but every sailor declared they could see my bones; and then he threw me all along the deck, and jumped many times upon the pit of my stomach, in order to endanger my life; and had not the people laid hold of my two legs, and thrown me under the windlass, after the manner they throw dead cats or dogs, he would have ended his despotic cruelty in murder.” This free and easy mode of recreation was much indulged in by seafaring officers in that time, but this Tucker appears to have been really what Silas calls him, “a blood-thirsty devil;” and stories of murder, and the incredible cruelties of the slave-trade lend their horrible fascination to the narrative of Silas Told. How would it be possible to work the commerce of the slave-trade without such characters as this Tucker, who presents much more the appearance of a lawless pirate than of the noble character we call a sailor? Those readers who would like to follow poor Silas through the entire details of his miseries on ship-board, his hairbreadth escapes from peril and shipwreck, must read them in Silas’s own book, if they can find it; but we may attempt to give some little account of his wreck upon the American coast, in New England. Few stories can be more charming than the picture he gives of his wanderings with his companions after their escape from the wreck, not because he and they were destitute, and all but naked, but because of the pleasant glimpses we have of the simple, hospitable, home life in those beautiful old New England days—hospitality of the most romantic and free-handed description.