In addition to his ability as
a navigator, this amiable young man appears to have wielded an
indefatigable pen, and to have been inspired to indulge its fluency
by the affection he very obviously bore to Peter Blood.
He kept the log of the forty-gun frigate Arabella, on which he
served as master, or, as we should say to-day, navigating officer,
as no log that I have seen was ever kept. It runs into some
twenty-odd volumes of assorted sizes, some of which are missing
altogether and others of which are so sadly depleted of leaves as
to be of little use. But if at times in the laborious perusal of
them - they are preserved in the library of Mr. James Speke of
Comerton - I have inveighed against these lacunae, at others I have
been equally troubled by the excessive prolixity of what remains
and the difficulty of disintegrating from the confused whole the
really essential parts.
I have a suspicion that Esquemeling - though how or where I can
make no surmise - must have obtained access to these records, and
that he plucked from them the brilliant feathers of several exploits
to stick them into the tail of his own hero, Captain Morgan.
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