_Although I have not the Honour to be acquainted with you, Great Sir, in whose Person dwells (as I hear) all the Virtue and Valour of slain_ English Heroes, _by a Transmigration; yet I am not unknown to the_ African _part of the Macrocosme, where my single Sword hath eaten its way through thousands, and hath afterwards drank it self into a surfeit, with the blood of those Hell-dyed Infidels. My forward valour soon rewarded my unknown Worth, and for no other reason, than I thought fit to command the Destinies, having so great a power over Life and Death, I was made a Captain. At first, the great care I had to preserve my own, made me expose my self as their Target, to guard them from their enemies Arrows, so that in one Battel, (wherein there was threescore thousand men of the adverse party, there was but three hundred of them escap’d with life to inform their friends of their Countreys loss,) I say, in that barbarous conflict I return’d home, as thick stuck with Arrows, as a porcupine with Quills; afterwards my Name served to fright the Rogues, without fighting a stroak. But the long absence from my own Countrey, possest me with so great a desire of seeing that blessed Soil, that gave me breath, I resolved to acquit my Command, and happy in this opportunity of tendring my Person and Services at the feet of a Soul so magnanimous as your self._
Having finished his Formal bumbastical hyperbolical Speech, the Governor was at a stand, what to do with this mighty _Garagantua_, having almost disenabled his tongue from speaking, by biting it e’ne through, to contein himself from laughing out right; but considering with himself, promised him at last, that he would Muster him in his own Company for the present, till he could find out something more suitable to his worth and quality, and for the present gave him some Money, which our Captain, getting drunk with all that night in the Company of some Officers into which he had intruded himself, and taking the liberty of undervaluing some of them in his prodigious cracking, was soundly kick’t for all his lame hand. But such was the Fortune of War, that our Captain had not trailed a Pike above a Month, before he stole a Chamber-Pot, two Quart-pots, Flaggons, with some other Pewter, and sold them at another Ale-house in the Town; with the Money he got drunk, and coming home to his Quarters, his Landlady taxing him with the Theft, made no more ado, but first abusing him in all the most opprobrius terms that a Whore could invent, that had served three seven years Apprentiships to a _Billingsgate_ Fish-woman, he then manfully beat her, and in that manner, that she was forc’d to cry out Murder. Neighbours coming in, seiz’d my valiant Captain, and in that pickle he was in, carried him before the Governour, who on seeing him in that drunken condition, sent him to the Mainguard, where he lay all that night as round as a Ball. The next Morning he was tryed by a Council of War, and finding him a Counterfeit, and that he was nothing but a commixt piece of Debauchery and Villany, condemned him to run the Gauntlet, which he did on the _Hoe_ of _Plimouth_, through his own Company, and another drawn up thither for that purpose; and afterward at the old Town-gate, had his Sword broken over his head, and so cashier’d.