I have purposely left out of these pages the record of the voyage. One such voyage is much like another, and though it was all new to me it would not be new to others. I might like to dwell again upon the first land we made, the Island of St. Jago, where we had civil entertainment of a Portuguese gentleman and of a negro Romish priest, with a merry heart and merry heels. My mother would have loved to go marketing in that place, for I bought no less than one hundred sweet oranges for half a paper of pins, and five fat hens for the other half of the paper. I could talk of our becalms and our storms and our crossing the Line, and of our trouble with the travado-wind. But as I do not wish to weary with the repetition of an oft-told tale, I will say no more of our voyage until we came to the Cape which is so happily named of Good Hope. It was a very wonderful voyage for me; it would not seem a very wonderful voyage to others, who have either made it themselves or who know out of book knowledge all and more than all that I could tell them. But I may say that I was a very different lad when we came to the Cape from the lad who had got on board of the Royal Christopher so many months earlier. I was but a pale-faced boy when I sailed, only a landsman, and no great figure as a landsman. But when we came to the Cape I was so coloured by the winds and the suns and the open life that my face and hands were well-nigh of the tint of burnished copper. I had always been a fairly strong lad; but now my strength was multiplied many times, and, thanks to my dear master, my skill to use that strength was marvellously advanced. Which proved to be of infinite service to me and others better than myself by-and-by.

We stayed some little time at Cape Town; how long now I do not closely remember, but, as I think, a matter of four weeks or more. For the Captain had some old friends amongst the Dutch colony, and there were certain matters of revictualling the ship to be thought of, and Lancelot longed for a little shooting and hunting. For my part, I was by no means loth to tread the soil again, for, though I love the sea dearly, I have no hatred for firm earth as other seamen have, but look upon myself as a kind of amphibious animal, and like the land and the water impartially. And there was a great joy and wonder to me to see a new country and a new town—I, who knew of no other town than Sendennis, and knew no more of London than of Grand Cairo, or of the capital of the Mogul. I remember that we stayed some days under the roof of a leading Dutch merchant of the place, who entertained us very handsomely, and that his brother, who was a somewhat younger man than he, and who spoke our English tongue well, took Lancelot and me many times a-shooting and a-fishing, and that we had some rare and savage sport. For the town is but a small one, and there is excellent sport to be had well-nigh at its back doors, as it were. I should have loved dearly to have wandered inward far inland towards the great mountains, for I heard wonderful tales, both from the Dutchmen and their black men, of treasures that the bowels of these mountains were said to hold. Of course that was out of the question, with the Royal Christopher waiting for her fate; but the tales fired me with memories of those Eastern tales that I have told you of, and I longed to out-rival Master Sindbad.

I cannot conscientiously affirm that I was sorry to leave Cape Town, and the wines that the Dutch settlers made, and the amazing Hottentots, and the other marvels of that my first experience of strange distant countries. We were all the better for our rest, Marjorie and Captain Amber, Lancelot, the colonists, the crew, and, in a word, all our fellowship. But we were all eager to be on the way again, for very different reasons. Captain Amber, because he was keen to place his foot upon his Land of Promise; Lancelot, because he wished what his uncle wished; Marjorie, because she wished to be with Lancelot; I myself, much out of eager, restless curiosity for new places and new adventures. For I was so simple in those days that the mere crossing of the seas seemed to me to be an adventure, a thing that I came later to regard as no more adventurous than the hiring of a hackney-coach. But in my heart I knew that the main reason for my bliss in boarding the Royal Christopher lay in the closer intimacy it gave me with maid Marjorie. In the little kingdom of the ship, where all in a sense were friends and adventurers together, there was less than on land to remind me that for me to dream myself her lover went far to prove me lunatic. So I was blithe to be afloat again. As for Cornelys Jensen, we were to learn soon enough in what direction lay his pleasure to be ploughing the high seas again.