They had not been half a quarter of an hour, but a negro came running to
me, and told me the white man was Inglese, as he called him; upon which
I ran back, eagerly enough, you may be sure, with him, and found, as
he said, that he was an Englishman; upon which he embraced me very
passionately, the tears running down his face. The first surprise of his
seeing us was over before we came, but any one may conceive it by the
brief account he gave us afterwards of his very unhappy circumstances,
and of so unexpected a deliverance, such as perhaps never happened to
any man in the world, for it was a million to one odds that ever he
could have been relieved; nothing but an adventure that never was heard
or read of before could have suited his case, unless Heaven, by some
miracle that never was to be expected, had acted for him.
He appeared to be a gentleman, not an ordinary-bred fellow, seaman, or
labouring man; this showed itself in his behaviour in the first moment
of our conversing with him, and in spite of all the disadvantages of his
miserable circumstances.
He was a middle-aged man, not above thirty-seven or thirty-eight, though
his beard was grown exceedingly long, and the hair of his head and
face strangely covered him to the middle of his back and breast; he was
white, and his skin very fine, though discoloured, and in some places
blistered, and covered with a brown blackish substance, scurfy, scaly,
and hard, which was the effect of the scorching heat of the sun; he was
stark naked, and had been so, as he told us, upwards of two years.
He was so exceedingly transported at our meeting with him, that he could
scarce enter into any discourse at all with us that day; and when he
could get away from us for a little, we saw him walking alone, and
showing all the most extravagant tokens of an ungovernable joy; and even
afterwards he was never without tears in his eyes for several days,
upon the least word spoken by us of his circumstances, or by him of his
deliverance.
We found his behaviour the most courteous and endearing I ever saw
in any man whatever, and most evident tokens of a mannerly, well-bred
person appeared in all things he did or said, and our people were
exceedingly taken with him. He was a scholar and a mathematician; he
could not speak Portuguese indeed, but he spoke Latin to our surgeon,
French to another of our men, and Italian to a third.
He had no leisure in his thoughts to ask us whence we came, whither we
were going, or who we were; but would have it always as an answer to
himself, that to be sure, wherever we were a-going, we came from Heaven,
and were sent on purpose to save him from the most wretched condition
that ever man was reduced to.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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