468 SETTLING A COLONY.

such particular persons with me, as well to increase and recruit
their number, as by the particular necessary employments which
they were bred to, being artificers, to assist them in those things
in which, at present, they were to seek.

They were all together when I talked thus to them; and before
T delivered to them the stores I had brought, I asked them one
by one if they had entirely forgot and buried the first animosities
that had been among them, and would shake hands with one
another, and engage in a strict friendship and union of interest
that so there might be no more misunderstandings or jealousies.

William Atkins, with abundance of frankness and good humour,
said they had met with afflictions enough to make them all sober,
and enemies enough to make them all friends; that, for his part,
he would live and die with them; and was so far from designing
anything against the Spaniards, that he owned they had done
nothing to him but what his own mad humours made necessary,
and what he would have done, and perhaps much worse, in their
case; and that he would ask them pardon, if I desired it, for the
foolish and brutish things he had done to them; and was very
willing and desirous of living in terms of entire friendship and
union with them ; and would do anything that lay in his power to
convince them of it: and as for going to England, he cared not if
he did not go thither these twenty years.

The Spaniards said they had indeed at first disarmed and ex-
cluded William Atkins and his two countrymen for their ill
conduct, as they had let me know; and they appealed to me for
the necessity they were under to do so; but that William Atkins
had behaved himself so bravely in the great fight they had with
the savages, and on several occasions since, and had shown himself
80 faithful to, and concerned for, the general interest of them all,
that they had forgotten all that was past, and thought he merited
as much to be trusted with arms and to be supplied with neces-
saries as any of them; and that they had testified their satisfac-
tion in him by committing the command to him, next to the
governor himself. And as they had an ‘entire confidence in him
and all his countrymen, so they acknowledged that they had
merited that confidence by all the methods that honest men could