386 LIFE AND ADVENTURES OF

I had a great mind to buy it; so I went to him and told him
of it. He considered a while, for he was no rash man neither ;
and at last replied, “She is a little too big—however, we will
have her.” Accordingly, we bought the ship, and agreeing
with the master, we paid for her, and took possession. When
we had done so we resolved to engage the men, if we could,
to join with those we had, for the pursuing our business; but,
on a sudden, they having received not their wages, but their
share of the money, as we afterwards learned, not one of them
was to be found; we inquired much about them, and at length
were told that they were all gone together by land to Agra,
the great city of the Mogul’s residence, to proceed from thence
to Surat, and then go by sca to the Gulf of Persia.

Nothing had so much troubled me a good while as that I
should miss the opportunity of going with them; for such a
ramble, I thought, and in such company as would both have
guarded and diverted me, would have suited mightily with my
great design; and I should have both seen the world and gone
homeward too. But I was much better satisfied a few days
after, when I came to know what sort of fellows they were ; for,
in short, their history was, that this man they called captain was
the gunner only, not the commander; that they had been a
trading voyage, in which they had been attacked on shore
by some of the Malays, who had killed the captain and three
of his men; and that after the captain was killed, these men,
eleven in number, having resolved to run away with the ship,
brought her to Bengal, leaving the mate and five men more on
shore.

Well, let them get the ship how they would, we came
honestly by her, as we thought, though we did not, I confess,
examine into things so exactly as we ought; for we never in-
quired anything of the seamen, who would certainly have
faltered in their account, and contradicted one another. Some-
how or other we should have had reason to have suspected
them; but the man showed us a bill of sale for the ship, to one
Emanuel Clostershoven, or some such name, for I suppose it was
all a forgery, and called himself by that name, and we could not
contradict him: and withal, having no suspicion of the thing,
we went through with our bargain. We picked up some more
English sailors here after this, and some Dutch, and now we
resolved on a second voyage to the south-east for cloves, &c.—
that is to say, among the Philippine and Malacca isles. In
short, not to fill up this part of my story with trifles when what
is to come is so remarkable, I spent, from first to last, six years