Neither was this all;but my goods being all English manufactures,such as cloth,stuffs,baize,and things particularly valuable and desirable in the country,I found means to sell them to a very great advantage;so that I may say I had more than four times the value of my first cargo,and was now infinitely beyond my poor neighbour,I mean in the advancement of my plantation;for the first thing I did,I bought me a negro slave,and an European servant also;I mean another besides that which the captain brought me from Lisbon.
But as abused prosperity is oftentimes made the very means of our greatest adversity,so was it with me.I went on the next year with great success in my plantation.I raised fifty great rolls of tobacco on my own ground,more than I had disposed of for necessaries among my neighbours;and these fifty rolls,being each of above a hundredweight,were well cured,and laid by against the return of the fleet from Lisbon.And now,increasing in business and in wealth,my head began to be full of projects and undertakings beyond my reach,such as are,indeed,often the ruin of the best heads in business.
Had I continued in the station I was now in,I had room for all the happy things to have yet befallen me for which my father so earnestly recommended a quiet,retired life,and of which he had so sensibly described the middle station of life to be full of.But other things attended me,and I was still to be the wilful agent of all my own miseries;and particularly,to increase my fault and double the reflections upon myself,which in my future sorrows I should have leisure to make.All these miscarriages were procured by my apparent obstinate adhering to my foolish inclination of wandering abroad,and pursuing that inclination in contradiction to the clearest views of doing myself good in a fair and plain pursuit of those prospects,and those measures of life,which Nature and Providence concurred to present me with,and to make my duty.
As I had once done thus in my breaking away from my parents,so I could not be content now,but I must go and leave the happy view I had of being a rich and thriving man in my new plantation,only to pursue a rash and immoderate desire of rising faster than the nature of the thing admitted;and thus I cast myself down again into the deepest gulf of human misery that ever man fell into,or perhaps could be consistent with life and a state of health in the world.
To come,then,by the just degrees to the particulars of this part of my story.You may suppose,that having now lived almost four years in the Brazils,and beginning to thrive and prosper very well upon my plantation,I had not only learned the language,but had contracted acquaintance and friendship among my fellow planters,as well as among the merchants at St Salvador,which was our port,and that in my discourses among them I had frequently given them an account of my two voyages to the coast of Guinea,the manner of trading with the negroes there,and how easy it was to purchase upon the coast for trifles-such as beads,toys,knives,scissors,hatchets,bits of glass,and the like-not only gold dust,Guinea grains,elephants’teeth,etc.,but negroes,for the service of the Brazils,in great numbers.
They listened always very attentively to my discourses on these heads,but especially to that part which related to the buying negroes;which was a trade,at that time,not only not far entered into,but,as far as it was,had been carried on by the assiento,or permission,of the Kings of Spain and Portugal,and engrossed in the publick,so that few negroes were brought,and those excessive dear.
It happened,being in company with some merchants and planters of my acquaintance,and talking of those things very earnestly,three of them came to me the next morning,and told me they had been musing very much upon what I had discoursed with them of ,the last night,and they came to make a secret proposal to me.And after enjoining me secrecy,they told me that they had a mind to fit out a ship to go to Guinea;that they had all plantations as well as I,and were straitened for nothing so much as servants;that as it was a trade that could not be carried on because they could not publicly sell the negroes when they came home,so they desired to make but one voyage,to bring the negroes on shore privately,and divide them among their own plantations;and,in a word,the question was,whether I would go their supercargo in the ship,to manage the trading part upon the coast of Guinea;and they offered me that I should have my equal share of the negroes without providing any part of the stock.
This was a fair proposal,it must be confessed,had it been made to anyone that had not had a settlement and plantation of his own to look after,which was in a fair way of coming to be very considerable,and with a good stock upon it.But for me,that was thus entered and established,and had nothing to do but go on as I had begun,for three or four years more,and to have sent for the other hundred pounds from England;and who,in that time,and with that little addition,could scarce have failed of being worth three or four thousand pounds sterling,and that increasing too-for me to think of such a voyage,was the most preposterous thing that ever man,in such circumstances,could be guilty of.