As soon as Maquina had quitted us, we got under weigh, and stood again to the northward. We continued on the coast until the 11th of August, 1806,[142] when, having completed our trade, we sailed for China, to the great joy of all our crew, and particularly so to me. With a degree of satisfaction that I can ill express, did I quit a coast to which I was resolved nothing should again tempt me to return, and as the tops of the mountains sank in the blue waves of the ocean, I seemed to feel my heart lightened of an oppressive load.
We had a prosperous passage to China, arriving at Macao in December, from whence the brig proceeded to Canton. There I had the good fortune to meet a townsman and an old acquaintance in the mate of an English East Indiaman, named John Hill, whose father, a wealthy merchant in Hull in the Baltic trade, was a next-door neighbour to mine. Shortly after our arrival, the captain being on board of an English ship, and mentioning his having had the good fortune to liberate two men of the _Boston's_ crew from the savages, and that one of them was named Jewitt, my former acquaintance immediately came on board the brig to see me.
Words can ill express my feelings on seeing him. Circumstanced as I was, among persons who were entire strangers to me, to meet thus in a foreign land with one between whom and myself a considerable intimacy had subsisted, was a pleasure that those alone who have been in a similar situation can properly estimate. He appeared on his part no less happy to see me, whom he supposed to be dead, as the account of our capture had been received in England some time before his sailing, and all my friends supposed me to have been murdered. From this young man I received every attention and aid that a feeling heart interested in the fate of another could confer. He supplied me with a new suit of clothes and a hat, a small sum of money for my necessary expenses, and a number of little articles for sea stores on my voyage to America. I also gave him a letter for my father, in which I mentioned my wonderful preservation and escape through the humanity of Captain Hill, with whom I should return to Boston. This letter he enclosed to his father by a ship that was just sailing, in consequence of which it was received much earlier than it otherwise would have been.