scribes: "There is a significant phrase frequently used in those parts, that such a white man is grown black. It does not intend an alteration of complexion, but of disposition. I have known several in Africa who gradually became assimilated to the tempers, customs, and ceremonies of the natives so far as to prefer that country to England. They have also become dupes to all the pretended charms, necromancies, and divinations of the blinded Negroes; and put more trust in such things than the wiser sort of natives. A part of this spirit of infatuation was growing upon me :in time perhaps I might have yielded to the whole."
Though, during his residence on that frightful coast, it could not be said that "there was found in him any good thing towards the Lord God of Israel "yet one deep, powerful, and unswerving passion, which he cherished in his heart of hearts, towards her whom he afterwards married, but whom he then dared not hope to call his own, seems to have happily restrained him from some excesses, into which he would otherwise have run, amidst his headlong career of licentiousness. The same tender and hallowing affection, through his saddest reverses, had sweetened his thoughts, and softened his desperation, as well when ignominiously punished and degraded on board the Harwich, as when groaning out existence in hunger, thirst, nakedness, and disease, during his bondage under the bond-woman, the negro-mistress of his worse than negro-master. Through a long series of strange vicissitudes and appalling chastisements, he experienced how hard it is for the most determined to enter into the kingdom of darkness, though they fight their way, sword in hand, to the gates of hell, through opposing judgments and surrounding mercies. He did
