SUSSEX, _the Eleventh Month_, 1669.
As soon as I had dispatched the business I went about, I returned home
without delay, and to my great comfort found my wife well, and myself
very welcome to her; both which I esteemed as great favours.
Towards the latter part of the summer following I went into Kent again,
and in my passage through London received the unwelcome news of the loss
of a very hopeful youth who had formerly been under my care for
education. It was Isaac Penington, the second son of my worthy friends
Isaac and Mary Penington, a child of excellent natural parts, whose great
abilities bespoke him likely to be a great man, had he lived to be a man.
He was designed to be bred a merchant, and before he was thought ripe
enough to be entered thereunto, his parents, at somebody’s request, gave
leave that he might go a voyage to Barbadoes, only to spend a little
time, see the place, and be somewhat acquainted with the sea, under the
care and conduct of a choice friend and sailor, John Grove, of London,
who was master of a vessel, and traded to that island; and a little
venture he had with him, made up by divers of his friends and by me among
the rest. He made the voyage thither very well, found the watery element
agreeable, had his health there, liked the place, was much pleased with
his entertainment there, and was returning home with his little cargo, in
return for the goods he carried out, when on a sudden, through
unwariness, he dropped overboard, and, the vessel being under sail with a
brisk gale, was irrecoverably lost, notwithstanding the utmost labour,
care, and diligence of the master and sailors to have saved him.
This unhappy accident took from the afflicted master all the pleasure of
his voyage, and he mourned for the loss of this youth as if it had been
his own, yea only, son; for as he was in himself a man of a worthy mind,
so the boy, by his witty and handsome behaviour in general, and
obsequious carriage towards him in particular, had very much wrought
himself into his favour.
As for me, I thought it one of the sharpest strokes I had met with, for I
both loved the child very well and had conceived great hopes of general
good from him; and it pierced me the deeper to think how deeply it would
pierce his afflicted parents.
Sorrow for this disaster was my companion in this journey, and I
travelled the roads under great exercise of mind, revolving in my
thoughts the manifold accidents which the life of man was attended with
and subject to, and the great uncertainty of all human things; I could
find no centre, no firm basis, for the mind of man to fix upon but the
divine power and will of the Almighty. This consideration wrought in my
spirit a sort of contempt of what supposed happiness or pleasure this
world, or the things that are in and of it, can of themselves yield, and
raised my contemplation higher; which, as it ripened and came to some
degree of digestion, I breathed forth in mournful accents thus:—