To an author who has been accustomed to deal with the startling and the marvellous in the way of incident and adventure, nothing can be more amusing than the confident opinions of critics and readers as to the improbability, and frequently the impossibility, of particular scenes which often happen to be faithful descriptions of actual occurrences. In this manner several passages from "Kaloolah" and "The Berber" have been indicated by some of my many good natured and liberal critics in this country and in England, as taxing a little too strongly the credulity of readers. Among such passages, the escape, in the first pages of the Berber, of the young Englishman, by jumping overboard in the bay of Cadiz, and hiding himself in the darkness of the night beneath the overhanging stern of his boat, has been particularly pointed out. Now, if this was pure invention, it might be safely left to a jury of yankee boatmen or Spanish _barqueros_ to decide whether the incident was not in the highest degree probable and natural; but being literally founded in fact, it is perhaps unnecessary to make any such appeal. There may be, however, a few unadventurous souls who will still persist in their doubts as to the probability of the incident. For the especial benefit of such I will relate the true story of a boat adventure, which in every way is a thousand times more strange and incredible than any of the wildest inventions of the wildest romance. The voyage of Vasco di Gama around the Cape of Good Hope into the Indian Ocean, was the beginning of a complete revolution in the trade of Europe and the East. This trade, which, following the expensive route of Egypt and the Red Sea, had been for a long time in the hands of the Venetians and Genoese, suddenly turned itself into the new and cheap channel opened by the enterprise of the Portuguese. The merchants of Genoa and Venice found themselves unexpectedly cut off from their accustomed sources of wealth, while a tide of affluence rolled into the mouth of the Tagus, and Lisbon became the commercial mart of the world.