“The English colors way flyin’ from the top of the Rock, and at twelve o’clock every day the drums beat, and they played what they called ‘The roast beef of old England.’ In the mornin’ the revelie beat and six cannon was fired from the fort, and if any armed ships lay in the harbor they answered ’em; and every single hour in the night we could hear the sentinel’s heavy tread on the Rock, and his cry, ten o’clock and all’s well, eleven o’clock and all’s well, &c., and so he kept it up all night. Some on ’em told me they’d had distressed times round the old Rock afore this. About the time of our Revolutionary War the French and Spaniards leagued together and got hundreds of ships and thousands of sogers together, and battered away at the old fort, and shot more _red hot_ cannon balls agin it than you could shake a stick at; but they only went ‘_bum, bum_,’ and shivered the Rock a little, and fell down into the sea, and they attacked the fort on the land side and worked away there, day arter day, but they didn’t hurt a hair of the old Rock’s head, and finally they agreed to quit it.—Why Sir, all the nations on the globe could not take that fort. The English will always have it till the end of the world. Well I looked up through the straits, and it did look beautiful; I could see the African shore; yis, the same Africa where so many millions of my poor brothers and sisters had been stole and carried off into slavery—oh! I felt bad. Well, we sold our load of provisions to the governor of the Rock, and bought a few things and started for England.
“When we’d been out four days we was chased by a privateer, and once they got in a quarter of a mile on us, but we had the most canvass, and we histed the sky scrapers, moon rakers, and star gazers, and water sail, and a good wind. But they fired on us all the time they was near enough. They chased us two days, and then we fell in with a French frigate, and they hailed us, and wanted to know if we’d seen a privateer along the coast, and so the captain told all about it and they gin three cheers and bore away arter her.
“In a few hours we heard a dreadful cannonadin’, and a great cloud of smoke riz out of the sea, and we concluded they’d overhauled her, and we left her in good hands. We sailed on for Bristol, and arter we’d been there five days, the news come that a French frigate had captured a Spanish privateer, but didn’t take any of her crew, for no sooner than they found themselves taken than they blew up their ship.