ABSTRACT
This chapter is a record of the attempts of one, Nicholas Owen, an Irishman, to retrieve the fortunes of his family which had been squandered by a spendthrift father. Owen's object in writing, as he says in his preface, was to show the dangers of a seafaring life, an undertaking to which he was moved by a "powerful pashon" and by the consciousness that he had experienced "some particular axcedents that does not often happen in the life of others". Owen, however, was writing before the humanitarian feeling on the subject had become effective, and he himself took the trade as he found it, a most valued branch of English commerce and one which appeared to offer the possibility of fortune making to the needy. During the Seven Years' War with the consequent losses in shipping and scanty European supplies, Owen, in common with the other traders on the coast, felt the pinch of the disastrous decline in trade.
