The History and Remarkable Life of the Truly Honourable Colonel Jacque, Commonly Called Colonel JackDefoe, Daniel
General
The History and Remarkable Life of the Truly Honourable Colonel Jacque, Commonly Called Colonel Jack
Defoe, Daniel
Adventure stories, English; England -- Social life and customs -- 18th century -- Fiction; Picaresque fiction
The captain was not so bold as to meeting the English men-of-war
before, but he was as wary now; for, having a prize of such value in
his hands, he was resolved not to lose her again, if he could help it.
So he stood away to the southward, and that so far that I once thought
he was resolved to go into the Straits, and home by Marseilles. But
having sailed to the latitude of 45 degrees 3 quarters, or thereabouts,
he steered away east, into the bottom of the Bay of Biscay, and carried
us all into the river of Bordeaux, where, on notice of his arrival with
such a prize, his owners or principals came overland to see him, and
where they consulted what to do with her. The money they secured, to be
sure, and some of the cargo; but the ships sailed afterwards along the
coast to St. Malo, taking the opportunity of some French men-of-war
which were cruising on the coast to be their convoy as far as Ushant.
Here the captain rewarded and dismissed the English mate, as I have
said, who got a passage from thence to Dieppe by sea, and after that
into England, by the help of a passport, through Flanders to Ostend.
The captain, it seems, the more willingly shipped him off that he might
not discover to others what he had discovered to him.
I was now at Bordeaux, in France, and the captain asked me one morning
what I intended to do. I did not understand him at first, but he soon
gave me to understand that I was now either to be delivered up to the
state as an English prisoner, and so be carried to Dinan, in Brittany,
or to find means to have myself exchanged, or to pay my ransom, and
this ransom he told me at first was three hundred crowns.
I knew not what to do, but desired he would give me time to write to
England to my friends; for that I had a cargo of goods sent to them by
me from Virginia, but I did not know but it might have fallen into such
hands as his were, and if it was, I knew not what would be my fate. He
readily granted that; so I wrote by the post, and had the satisfaction,
in answer to it, to hear that the ship I was taken in had been retaken,
and carried into Portsmouth; which I doubted would have made my new
master more strict, and perhaps insolent; but he said nothing of it to
me, nor I to him, though, as I afterwards understood, he had advice of
it before.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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