The History and Remarkable Life of the Truly Honourable Colonel Jacque, Commonly called Colonel Jack

"Well, but now," says I, "you talk penitently, and I hope you are sincere; but what would be your case if you were delivered from the miserable condition of a slave sold for money, which you are now in? Should you not, think you, be the same man?"

"Blessed be God," says he, "that, if I thought I should, I would sincerely pray that I might not be delivered, and that I might for ever be a slave rather than a sinner."

"Well, but," says I, "suppose you to be under the same necessity, in the same starving condition, should you not take the same course?"

He replied very sharply, "That shows us the need we have of the petition in the Lord's prayer, 'Lead us not into temptation;' and of Solomon's or Agar's prayer, 'Give me not poverty, lest I steal.' I should ever beg of God not to be left to such snares as human nature cannot resist. But I have some hope, that I should venture to starve rather than to steal; but I also beg to be delivered from the danger, because I know not my own strength."

This was honestly spoken, indeed; and there really were such visible tokens of sincerity in all his discourse that I could not suspect him. On some of our discourses on this subject, he pulled out a little dirty paper-book, in which he had wrote down such a prayer in verse as I doubt few Christians in the world could subscribe to; and I cannot but record it, because I never saw anything like it in my life. The lines are as follow: -

"Lord! whatsoever sorrows rack my breast, Till crime removes too, let me find no rest; How dark soe'er my state or sharp my pain, Oh! let not troubles cease and sin remain. For Jesus' sake remove not my distress, Till free triumphant grace shall repossess The vacant throne from whence my sins depart, And make a willing captive of my heart; Till grace completely shall my soul subdue, Thy conquest full and my subjection true."

There were more lines on the same subject, but these were the beginning; and these touching me so sensibly, I have remembered them distinctly ever since, and have, I believe, repeated them to myself a thousand times.

I pressed him no more, you may be sure, after an answer so very particular and affecting as this was. It was easy to see the man was a sincere penitent, not sorrowing for the punishment he was suffering under; for his condition was no part of his affliction; he was rather thankful for it, as above; but his concern was a feeling and affecting sense of the wicked and abominable life he had led, the abhorred crimes he had committed both against God and man, and the little sense he had had of the condition he was in, and that even till he came to the place where he now was.

I asked him if he had no reflections of this kind after or before his sentence. He told me Newgate (for the prison at Bristol is called so, it seems, as well as that at London) was a place that seldom made penitents, but often made villains worse, till they learnt to defy God and devil; but that, however, he could look back with this satisfaction, that he could say he was not altogether insensible of it even then; but nothing that amounted to a thorough serious looking up to heaven; that he often indeed looked in, and reflected upon his past misspent life, even before he was in prison, when the intervals of his wicked practices gave some time for reflection, and he would sometimes say to himself, "Whither am I going? to what will all these things bring me at last? and where will they end? Sin and shame follow one another, and I shall certainly come to the gallows. Then," said he, "I would strike upon my breast, and say, 'O wicked wretch! when will you repent?' and would answer myself as often, 'Never! never! never! except it be in a gaol or at a gibbet.'

"Then," said he, "I would weep and sigh, and look back a little upon my wretched life, the history of which would make the world amazed; but, alas! the prospect was so dark, and it filled me with so much terror, that I could not bear it. Then I would fly to wine and company for relief; that wine brought on excess, and that company, being always wicked company like yourself, brought on temptation, and then all reflection vanished and I was the same devil as before."

He spoke this with so much affection that his face was ever smiling when he talked of it, and yet his eyes had tears standing in them at the same time, and all the time; for he had a delightful sorrow, if that be a proper expression, in speaking of it.

This was a strange relation to me, and began to affect me after a manner that I did not understand. I loved to hear him talk of it, and yet it always left a kind of a dead lump behind it upon my heart, which I could give no reason for, nor imagine to what it should tend; I had a heaviness on my soul, without being able to describe it or to say what ailed me.

Well, he went on with his relation. "After this," says he, "I fell into the hands of a justice for a trifle, a piece of sport in our crime; and I, that for a hundred robberies, as well on the highway as otherwise, the particulars of which would fill a book to give an account of, ought, whenever I was taken, to be hanged in chains, and who, if it had been public, could not have failed of having twenty people come in against me, was privately hurried into a country gaol under a wrong name; tried for a small fact, within benefit of clergy, and in which I was not principally guilty, and by this means obtained the favour of being transported.

"And what think you," said he, "has most sensibly affected me, and brought on the blessed change that, I hope I may say, God has wrought in my soul? Not the greatness of my crimes, but the wonders of that merciful Providence, which, when it has mercy in store for a man, often brings him into the briers, into sorrow and misery for lesser sins, that men may be led to see how they are spared from the punishment due to them for the greater guilt which they know lies upon them. Do you think that when I received the grant of transportation I could be insensible what a miracle of divine goodness such a thing must be to one who had so many ways deserved to be hanged, and must infallibly have died if my true name had been known, or if the least notice had been given that it was such a notorious wretch as I that was in custody? There began the first motive of repentance; for certainly the goodness of our great Creator in sparing us, when we forfeit our lives to His justice, and His merciful bringing us out of the miseries which we plunge ourselves into, when we have no way to extricate ourselves; His bringing those very miseries to be the means of our deliverance, and working good to us out of evil, when we are working the very evil out of His good; I say, these things are certainly the strongest motives to repentance that are in the world, and the sparing thieves from the gallows certainly makes more penitents than the gallows itself.

"It is true," continued he, "that the terror of punishment works strongly upon the mind; in view of death men are filled with horror of soul, and immediately they call that repentance which I doubt is too often mistaken, being only a kind of anguish in the soul, which breeds a grief for the punishment that is to be suffered-an amazement founded upon the dreadful view of what is to follow. But the sense of mercy is quite another thing; this seizes all the passions and all the affections, and works a sincere, unfeigned abhorrence of the crime, as a crime, as an offence against our Benefactor, as an act of baseness and ingratitude to Him who has given us life and all the blessings and comforts of life, and who has conquered us by continuing to do us good, when He has been provoked to destroy us.

"This, sir," says he, "has been the fountain of that repentance which I so much rejoice in; this is the delightful sorrow," says he, "that I spoke of just now; and this makes smiles sit on my face while tears run from my eyes, a joy that I can no otherwise express than by telling you, sir, that I never lived a happy day since I came to an age of acting in the world till I landed in this country, and worked in your plantation, naked and hungry, weary and faint, oppressed with cold in one season, and heat in the other. Then I began to see into my own ways, and see the difference between the hardships of the body and the torment of the mind. Before I revelled in fulness, and here I struggled with hard fare; then I wallowed in sloth and voluptuous ease; here I laboured till nature sometimes was just sinking under the load; but with this difference in the felicity of either case, namely, that there I had a hell in my soul, was filled with horror and confusion, was a daily terror to myself, and always expected a miserable end; whereas here I had a blessed calm of soul, an emblem and forerunner of heaven, thankful and humble, adoring that mercy that had snatched me out of the jaws of the devil. These took up my thoughts, and made my most weary hours pleasant to me, my labour light, and my heart cheerful. I never lay down on my hard lodging but I praised God with the greatest excess of affection, not only that it was not the condemned hole, and that I was delivered from the death I had deserved, but that it was not Shooter's Hill; that I was not still a robber, a terror to just and honest men, a plunderer of the innocent and the poor, a thief, and a villain, that ought to be rooted out from the earth for the safety of others; but that I was delivered from the horrid temptation of sinning to support my luxury, and making one vice necessary to another; and this, I bear witness, is sufficient to sweeten the bitterest sorrow, and make any man be thankful for Virginia, or a worse place, if that can be."

He then entertained me with an opinion of his, that if it were possible for the face of heaven and hell to be disclosed and laid open, and that men could be made capable of seeing distinctly and separately the joys and glory and utmost felicity of one, and the horrors of the other, and to make a judgment of both according to the power of human reasoning, the first would have a stronger and more powerful effect to reform the world than the latter; but this we had further discourses about on many occasions.

If it should be inquired how I was capable of hearing all this, and having no impressions made upon my mind by it, especially when it so many ways suited my own case, and the condition of the former part of my life, I shall answer that presently by myself. However, I took no notice of it to him, for he had quite other notions of me than I had of myself; nor did I, as is usual in such cases, enter into any confidence with him on my own story, only that I took sometimes the occasion to let him know that I did not come over to Virginia in the capacity of a criminal, or that I was not transported; which, considering how many of the inhabitants there were so who then lived in good circumstances, was needful enough to be done.

But as to myself, it was enough that I was in condition now; 'twas no matter to anybody what I had been; and as it was grown pretty much out of memory from what original disaster I came into the country, or that I was ever a servant otherwise than voluntary, and that it was no business of mine to expose myself, so I kept that part close. But for all that, it was impossible for me to conceal the disorder I was in as often as he talked of these things. I had hitherto gone on upon a notion of things founded only in their appearance, as they affected me with good or evil, esteeming the happy and unhappy part of life to be those that gave me ease or sorrow, without regarding, or indeed much understanding, how far those turns of life were influenced by the Giver of Life, or how far they were all directed by a sovereign God that governs the world, and all the creatures he had made.

As I had no education but as you have heard, so I had had no instruction, no knowledge of religion, or indeed of the meaning of it; and though I was now in a kind of search after religion, it was a mere looking, as it were, into the world to see what kind of a thing or place it was, and what had been done in it. But as to Him that made it, there had truly been scarce a creature among all that He had made, with souls in them, that were so entirely without the knowledge of God as I was, and made so little inquiry about it.

But the serious, affectionate discourse of this young man began to have different effects upon me, and I began to say to myself, "This man's reflections are certainly very just; but what a creature am I, and what have I been doing! – I that never once did this in all my life; that never said so much-'God, I thank Thee for all that I have been saved from, or all that I have been brought to in this world;' and yet my life has been as full of variety, and I have been as miraculously delivered from dangers and mischiefs, and as many of them, as ever he has. And if it has all been brought to pass by an invisible hand in mercy to me, what have I been doing, and where have I lived, that I only should be the most thoughtless and unthankful of all God's creatures?"

This, indeed, began to grow upon me, and made me very melancholy; but as to religion, I understood so little about it that if I had resolved upon any such thing as a new course of life, or to set about a religious change, I knew not at which end to begin or what to do about it.

One day it happened that my tutor-for so I always called him-had the Bible in his hand, and was looking in it, as he generally did many times every day, though I knew not for what. Seeing the Bible, I took it out of his hands, and went to look in it, which I had done so little before that I think I might safely say I had never read a chapter in it in all my life. He was talking of the Bible then as a book only, and where he had it, and how he brought it to Virginia, and in some ecstasy he took and kissed it. "This blessed book!" says he; "this was all the treasure I brought out from England with me. And a comfortable treasure it has been to me," added he; "I would not have been without it in my sorrows for any other treasure in the world;" and so he went on at large.

I, that had no notion of what he meant-only, as I have said above, some young infant thoughts about the works of Providence in the world and its merciful dealings with me-took the book out of his hand and went to look in it; and the book opened at the Acts xxvi. 28, where Felix says to St. Paul, "Almost thou persuadest me to be a Christian." "I think," says I, "here's a line hits me to a tittle, upon the long account you have given of yourself, and I must say them to you, as the governor here said;" and so I read the words to him. He blushed at the text, and returns, "I wish I could answer you in the very words the Apostle returned to him in the next verse: 'I would thou wert both almost, and altogether such as I am, except these bonds.'"

I was now more than thirty years old by my own account, and as well as it was possible for me to keep a reckoning of my age, who had nobody left that ever knew my beginning; I was, I say, above thirty years old, and had gone through some variety in the world. But as I was perfectly abandoned in my infancy, and utterly without instruction in my youth, so I was entirely ignorant of everything that was worthy the name of religion in the world; and this was the first time that ever any notion of religious things entered into my heart. I was surprised at this man's talk, and that several ways particularly he talked so feelingly of his past circumstances, and they were so like my own, that every time he made a religious inference from his own condition, and argued from one condition of his to another, it struck into my thoughts like a bullet from a gun that I had certainly as much to be thankful for and to repent of as he had, except only that I had no knowledge of better things to be thankful for, which he had. But in return for that, I was delivered and set up in the world, made a master, and easy, and was in good circumstances, being raised from the very same low, distressed condition as he was in-I mean a sold servant-but that he remained so still; so that, if his sin had been greater than mine, so his distress was still greater.

This article of gratitude struck deep and lay heavy upon my mind. I remembered that I was grateful to the last degree to my old master, who had raised me from my low condition, and that I loved the very name of him, or, as might be said, the very ground he trod on; but I had not so much as once thought of any higher obligation; no, nor so much as, like the Pharisee, had said once, "God, I thank thee," to Him, for all the influence which His providence must have had in my whole affair.

It occurred to me presently that if none of all these things befall us without the direction of a Divine Power, as my new instructor had told me at large, and that God had ordered everything, the most minute and least transaction of life, insomuch that not a hair of our head shall fall to the ground without His permission; I say, it occurred to me that I had been a most unthankful dog to that Providence that had done so much for me; and the consequence of the reflection was immediately this: how justly may that Power, so disobliged, take away again His wool and His flax, with which I am now clothed, and reduce me to the misery of my first circumstances.

This perplexed me much, and I was very pensive and sad; in which, however, my new instructor was a constant comforter to me, and I learned every day something or other from him; upon which I told him one morning that I thought be must leave off teaching me Latin, and teach me religion. He spoke with a great deal of modesty of his being incapable of informing me of anything that I did not know, and proposed to me to read the Scriptures every day, as the sure and only fund of instruction. I answered that, in the words of the eunuch to St. Philip when the apostle asked him if he understood what he read: "How can I, unless some one guide me?"

We talked frequently upon this subject, and I found so much reason to believe he was a sincere convert that I can speak of him as no other in all I have to say of him. However, I cannot say my thoughts were yet ripened for an operation of that kind. I had some uneasiness about my past life, and I lived now, and had done so before I knew him, a very regular, sober life, always taken up in my business and running into no excesses. But as to commencing penitent, as this man had done, I cannot say I had any convictions upon me sufficient to bring it on, nor had I a fund of religious knowledge to support me in it. So it wore off again gradually, as such things generally do where the first impressions are not deep enough.

In the meantime, as he read over long lectures of his own disasters to me, and applied them all seriously to me, so our discourse was always very solid and weighty, and we had nothing of levity between us, even when we were not concerned in religious discourses. He read history to me; and, where books were wanting, he gave me ideas of those things which had not been recorded by our modern histories, or at least that our number of books would not reach. By these things he raised an unquenchable thirst in me, after seeing something that was doing in the world; and the more because all the world was at that time engaged, more or less, in the great war wherein the French king might be said to be engaged with and against all the powers of Europe.

Now, I looked upon myself as one buried alive in a remote part of the world, where I could see nothing at all, and hear but a little of what was seen, and that little not till at least half a year after it was done, and sometimes a year or more; and, in a word, the old reproach often came in the way-namely, that even this was not yet the life of a gentleman.

It was true that this was much nearer to it than that of a pickpocket, and still nearer than that of a sold slave; but, in short, this would not do, and I could receive no satisfaction in it. I had now a second plantation, a very considerable one, and it went forward very well. I had on it almost a hundred servants already of sundry sorts, and an overseer that I had a great deal of reason to say I might depend upon, and but that I had a third in embryo, and newly begun, I had nothing to hinder me from going where I pleased.

However, I now began to frame my thoughts for a voyage to England, resolving then to act as I should see cause, but with a secret resolution to see more of the world if possible, and realise those things to my mind which I had hitherto only entertained remote ideas of by the help of books.

Accordingly I pushed forward the settlement of my third plantation, in order to bring it to be in a posture either to be let to a tenant or left in trust with an overseer, as I should find occasion.

Had I resolved to leave it to an overseer or steward, no man in the world could have been fit for it like my tutor; but I could not think of parting with him, who was the cause of my desire of travelling, and who I concluded to make my partner in my travels.

END OF VOL. I.

THE LIFE OF COLONEL JACQUE.

It was three years after this before I could get things in order, fit for my leaving the country. In this time I delivered my tutor from his bondage, and would have given him his liberty, but, to my great disappointment, I found that I could not empower him to go for England till his time was expired, according to the certificate of his transportation, which was registered; so I made him one of my overseers, and thereby raised him gradually to a prospect of living in the same manner and by the like steps that my good benefactor raised me, only that I did not assist him to enter upon planting for himself as I was assisted, neither was I upon the spot to do it. But this man's diligence and honest application, even unassisted, delivered himself, [though not] any farther than, as I say, by making him an overseer, which was only a present ease and deliverance to him from the hard labour and fare which he endured as a servant.

However, in this trust he behaved so faithfully and so diligently that it recommended him in the country; and when I came back I found him in circumstances very different from what I left him in, besides his being my principal manager for near twenty years, as you shall hear in its place.

I mention these things the more at large that, if any unhappy wretch who may have the disaster to fall into such circumstances as these may come to see this account, they may learn the following short lessons from these examples: -

I. That Virginia and a state of transportation may be the happiest place and condition they were ever in for this life, as, by a sincere repentance and a diligent application to the business they are put to, they are effectually delivered from a life of flagrant wickedness and put in a perfect new condition, in which they have no temptation to the crimes they formerly committed, and have a prospect of advantage for the future.

II. That in Virginia the meanest and most despicable creature, after his time of servitude is expired, if he will but apply himself with diligence and industry to the business of the country, is sure (life and health supposed) both of living well and growing rich.

As this is a foundation which the most unfortunate wretch alive is entitled to, a transported felon is, in my opinion, a much happier man than the most prosperous untaken thief in the nation. Nor are those poor young people so much in the wrong as some imagine them to be that go voluntarily over to those countries, and in order to get themselves carried over and placed there, freely bind themselves there, especially if the persons into whose hands they fall do anything honestly by them; for, as it is to be supposed that those poor people knew not what course to take before, or had miscarried in their conduct before, here they are sure to be immediately provided for, and, after the expiration of their time, to be put in a condition to provide for themselves. But I return to my own story, which now begins a new scene.

I was now making provision for my going to England. After having settled my plantation in such hands as was fully to my satisfaction, my first work was to furnish myself with such a stock of goods and money as might be sufficient for my occasions abroad, and particularly might allow me to make large returns to Maryland, for the use and supply of all my plantations. But when I came to look nearer into the voyage, it occurred to me that it would not be prudent to put my cargo all on board the same ship that I went in; so I shipped at several times five hundred hogsheads of tobacco in several ships for England, giving notice to my correspondent in London that I would embark about such a time to come over myself, and ordering him to insure for a considerable sum, proportioned to the value of my cargo.