They were mighty warm upon their revenge, and they would go on shore,
and destroy five hundred of them. "Well," says William, "and suppose you
do, what are you the better?" "Why, then," says one of them, speaking
for the rest, "we shall have our satisfaction." "Well, and what will you
be the better for that?" says William. They could then say nothing to
that. "Then," says William, "if I mistake not, your business is money;
now, I desire to know, if you conquer and kill two or three thousand of
these poor creatures, they have no money, pray what will you get? They
are poor naked wretches; what shall you gain by them? But then," says
William, "perhaps, in doing this, you may chance to lose half-a-score of
your own company, as it is very probable you may. Pray, what gain is
in it? and what account can you give the captain for his lost men?" In
short, William argued so effectually, that he convinced them that it
was mere murder to do so; and that the men had a right to their own,
and that they had no right to take them away; that it was destroying
innocent men, who had acted no otherwise than as the laws of nature
dictated; and that it would be as much murder to do so, as to meet a man
on the highway, and kill him, for the mere sake of it, in cold blood,
not regarding whether he had done any wrong to us or no.
These reasons prevailed with them at last, and they were content to
go away, and leave them as they found them. In the first skirmish they
killed between sixty and seventy men, and wounded a great many more; but
they had nothing, and our people got nothing by it, but the loss of one
man's life, and the wounding sixteen more, as above.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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