Contents -Volume INDEX -AUTHOR INDEX -BIBLIOGRAPHIC RECORD

Stedman and Hutchinson, comps. A Library of American Literature:
An Anthology in Eleven Volumes. 1891.
Vols. IX–XI: Literature of the Republic, Part IV., 1861–1889

Fellow-Passengers to England

By Charles Wolley (fl. 1700)

OLD CLAUS, the Indian, made me the owner of a couple of well-grown bear’s cubs, two or three days before I took shipping for England, he thinking I would have brought them along with me; which present I accepted with a great deal of ceremony (as we must everything from their hands) and ordered my negro boy about twelve years old to tie them under the crib by my horse, and so left them to any one’s acceptance upon my going aboard. I brought over with me a gray squirrel, a parrot and a rackoon. The first the Lady Sherard had some years at Sapleford, the second, I left at London; the last I brought along with me to Alford, where one Sunday in prayer time, some boys giving it nuts, it was choked with a shell. It was by nature a very curious cleanly creature, never eating anything but first washed it with its forefeet very carefully. The Parrot was a prattling familiar bird, and diverting company in my solitary intervals upon our voyage home. As I was talking with it upon the quarter deck, by a sudden rolling of the ship, down drops Poll overboard into the sea and cried out amain, “poor Poll.” The ship being almost becalmed, a kind seaman threw out a rope, and Poll seized it with his beak and came safe aboard again; this for my own diversion.