When I came to London I was very well received by my friend, to whom I had consigned my effects, and I found myself in very good circumstances; for all my goods, which, as above, by several ships, I had consigned to him, came safe to hand; and my overseers that I had left behind had shipped at several times four hundred hogsheads of tobacco to my correspondent in my absence, being the product of my plantation, or part of it, for the time of my being abroad; so that I had above £1000 in my factor’s hands, two hundred hogsheads of tobacco besides left in hand, not sold. I had nothing to do now but entirely to conceal myself from all that had any knowledge of me before. And this was the easiest thing in the world to do; for I was grown out of everybody’s knowledge, and most of those I had known were grown out of mine. My captain, who went with me, or, rather, who carried me away, I found, by inquiring at the proper place, had been rambling about the world, came to London, fell into his own trade, which he could not forbear, and growing an eminent highwayman, had made his exit at the gallows, after a life of fourteen years’ most exquisite and successful rogueries, the particulars of which would make, as I observed, an admirable history. My other brother Jacque, who I called major, followed the like wicked trade, but was a man of more gallantry and generosity; and having committed innumerable depredations upon mankind, yet had always so much dexterity as to bring himself off, till at length he was laid fast in Newgate, and loaded with irons, and would certainly have gone the same way as the captain, but he was so dexterous a rogue that no gaol, no fetters, would hold him; and he, with two more, found means to knock off their irons, worked their way through the wall of the prison, and let themselves down on the outside in the night. So escaping, they found means to get into France, where he followed the same trade, and with so much success that he grew famous by the name of Anthony, and had the honour, with three of his comrades, whom he had taught the English way of robbing generously, as they called it, without murdering or wounding, or ill-using those they robbed;—I say, he had the honour to be broke upon the wheel at the Greve in Paris. All these things I found means to be fully informed of, and to have a long account of the particulars of their conduct from some of their comrades who had the good fortune to escape, and who I got the knowledge of without letting them so much as guess at who I was or upon what account I inquired.