I have
been, in all my circumstances, a memento to those who are touched
with the general plague of mankind, whence, for aught I know, one
half of their miseries flow: I mean that of not being satisfied
with the station wherein God and Nature hath placed them - for, not
to look back upon my primitive condition, and the excellent advice
of my father, the opposition to which was, as I may call it, my
ORIGINAL SIN, my subsequent mistakes of the same kind had been the
means of my coming into this miserable condition; for had that
Providence which so happily seated me at the Brazils as a planter
blessed me with confined desires, and I could have been contented
to have gone on gradually, I might have been by this time - I mean
in the time of my being in this island - one of the most
considerable planters in the Brazils - nay, I am persuaded, that by
the improvements I had made in that little time I lived there, and
the increase I should probably have made if I had remained, I might
have been worth a hundred thousand moidores - and what business had
I to leave a settled fortune, a well-stocked plantation, improving
and increasing, to turn supercargo to Guinea to fetch negroes, when
patience and time would have so increased our stock at home, that
we could have bought them at our own door from those whose business
it was to fetch them? and though it had cost us something more, yet
the difference of that price was by no means worth saving at so
great a hazard.
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