PREFACE

TO

LIEUTENANT BEAVER'S JOURNAL.

I HAD long doubted whether or not I should publish the Journal I had kept during my residence on the island of Bulama, or whether it would not have been better to make short extracts from it only; but, though the form of a Journal is tedious, and the matter, in that shape, generally uninteresting, yet on this occasion it was thought best to preserve it, because it was written at the time, and with the feelings which our situation then called forth. It were easy to have put it into a different form and language, but then it would not have been what it professes to be, a transcript of my Journal actually written on the island.

There are parts, very many perhaps, which require an apology, and which it may be said, should not have been published: for instance, my first day's Journal of the 19th of July, and the one following, and those of the 12th and 17th of August, with many others; but, as before observed, it was thought best to publish the Journal as it was written; because it is conceived that if it had any interest at all, it arose from laying before the reader, our precise situation and sentiments at the time; making him as it were, one of the colonists, without experiencing any of their difficulties.

As this Journal, therefore, was written without the most distant idea of publishing it, and with the greatest probability of never being carried off the island; as it was written amidst some danger, and great bodily, as well as mental exertions, it is confidently hoped that the liberal-minded will not too rigidly criticise it; about the opinions of others I am not very anxious.

Words have been sometimes, but not frequently, altered: the sense never.

Lieutenant Beaver's Journal, &c.

ABOUT one o’clock the Calypso sailed for Sierra Leone, with the major part of the colonists, and saluted us with three guns, which was returned with seven.