“Well, we had a quick passage, and made the New York light, and I never was so glad to see that light-house in my life, for we expected to git overhauled by an English man-of-war or a privateer every day. Well, we got in the last of March, and this was 1812; and well we did, for the first of April an embargo was laid on all the vessels in the ports of the United States, and the nineteenth of June war was declared agin Great Britain, and then the Atlantic was all a blaze of fire.
“Captain Williams quit his ship, and took a privateer, and he tried to git me ‘long with him, and I thought I would, for a while, but, finally, I concluded I wouldn’t, _for I was too much afeared of them ’ere blue plums that flew so thick across the brine for two or three years_. ☜
“Well, captain went out and was gone thirty days, and come back, and his success was so good that his common hands shared five hundred dollars apiece, and if I’d a gone, I should have had my five hundred dollars back agin; but I’d no idee of going to be shot at for money, like these ’ere fools and gumps that goes down to the Florida swamps, to be shot at all day by Ingens, for eighteen pence a day. Captain met me one day in the street, and says he, ‘nig, if you’d only gone with me, you’d a been as big a cuffee now as any on ’em.’ I says ‘captain, I don’t care ’bout havin’ my head shot off of my shoulders; I’m big cuffee ’nough now!’
“Well, I didn’t go to sea durin’ the war, and afore we got through with that, I got off of the notion of goin’ at all, and I concluded I’d spend the rest of my days on ‘terra firma,’ as I’d been tossed round on the brine long ’nough, and satisfied myself with seein’ and travel, and so I stayed, and I han’t been out of sight of land ever sence.
“But, one dreadful thing happened to me by goin’ to sea,—_I got dreadfully depraved_; and I b’lieve there warn’t a man on the globe that would swear worse than I would, and a wickeder feller didn’t breathe than Pete Wheeler. No language was too vile or wicked for me to take into my mouth; and it did seem to me, when I thought about it, that I blasphemed my Maker almost every minute through the day; and I used to frequent the theatre, and all bad places, and drink till I was dead drunk for days; and nobody can bring a charge agin me for hardly one sin but murder and counterfeitin’ that I ain’t guilty on. When I thought ’bout it, I used to think it the greatest wonder on ‘arth that God Almighty didn’t cut me off and strike me to hell, for I desarved the deepest damnation in pardition; and if any man on ‘arth says I didn’t, why, all I have to say to sich a man is, that he ain’t a judge. _Why, as for prayer_, I never thought of sich a thing for years; and as for Sabbath day, I didn’t hardly know when it come, only I used to be on a frolic or spree on that day, worse than any other day in the week. As for the bible, why, for years and years I never see one, or heard one read; and I didn’t, at that time, know how to read myself a word; and for six years I never had a word said to me ’bout my soul, or the danger of losin’ my soul, and I become as much of a heathen as any man in the Hottentot country: and the truth is, no man can make me out so bad as I raly was, _for besides all I acted out_, there was a hell in my bosom all the time, and these outrageous things was only a little bilin’ over,—only a few leetle streams that run out of a black fountain-head.