“Well, we had all the fun on shore and aboard we could ask for. White and black, we was all hail fellers, well met. We used to have a heap of visiters aboard, to hear ’bout America. We’d have an interpreter to tell our stories, and almost make some of them smoking, thick-skulled Dutchmen b’lieve that America flowed with milk and honey, and that pigs run ‘round the streets here with knives and forks in their backs, cryin’ out ‘eat me.’ I used to be a pretty slick darkey for fixin’ out a story, tu, and a big one ’bout America; and then some white man would set by my side and put the edge on, and ‘twould go without any greasin’; and the captain used to say, always, that if any deviltry was agoin’ on, Pete was always sure to have a finger in the pie. Well, we used to talk a considerable ’bout the wars they was a havin’ in the old countries, at that time, and they said they could take us up to a place, a few miles from there, where there had been a great battle, sometime afore; and for curiosity, we all went up to see it. Well, we goes, and finds thirty or forty acres, and there wasn’t a green thing on it, and ’twas covered with bones and skulls, and all kinds of balls and spikes, and bayonets, and whole heaps of bones, and I guess you never see so melancholy a place in all your life. Oh! it made me sick of war to see thousands and thousands of human bein’s a bleachin’ on the sand. And it seemed that the ground where that battle was fit, wouldn’t let any green thing grow there, and I don’t b’lieve any green thing grows there till this day. And there we was, a hearin’ every day ’bout Bonaparte, and his killin’ his thousands, and his takin’ this city and that city, and his conquerin’ this gineral and that gineral; but Lord Wellington give him a tough heat on the land, and Lord Nelson on the sea; but the world see _terrible sorry times_ for a few years, while that Napoleon was a runnin’ his career.
“Well, captain got back to Amsterdam the first of April, and on the fourteenth we weighed anchor for New York. Well, come the sixth day I guess, at evenin’ arter I’d done all my work, and was a settin’ on the railin’ rother carelessly, the boom jibed and struck me on the top of my head, and the first I knew I was pitched head first into the brine. I fell into the wake and swum as fast as I could, and when I riz on the wave I could see the ship and her lights, and then when I went down in the troughs I lost sight of her, and I begun to feel kind’a streakish I tell ye. But pretty soon a rope struck me on the head, and I grabbed and hung on, and the hands aboard drew, and finally I got up pretty near, and the first I knew, and ’bout the last I knew, a wave come and plunged me head first right agin _the starn_, and that made all jar agin’ and I see mor’n fifty thousand stars; but I hung on, and they drawed me up aboard, and when I come fairly tu, the captain comes along and says:—