Indies. He was again captured and taken prisoner by
the British.

He was, however, transferred to a British merchant vessel on which he
rendered a little service by way of commutation, when he was set at
liberty on St. Eustatia. The island has an area of 189 square miles,
population 13,700; latitude 17 deg., 30', North. Climate generally healthy,
but with terrific hurricanes and earthquakes, soil very fertile and
highly cultivated by the thrifty Hollanders, with slave labor. It has
belonged successively to the Spanish, French, English and Dutch. Having
been enfeebled by his fever of the winter before, Timothy Boardman now
twenty-six years old, worked for several months at his trade with good
wages. I have heard him say that there the tropical sun shone directly
down the chimney. He used to relate also, how fat the young negroes
would become in sugaring time, when the sweets of the canefield flowed
as freely as water. He returned home to Connecticut probably late in
the year 1780. Vermont was then the open field for emigration. It was
rapidly receiving settlers from Connecticut. I have no knowledge that he
ever made any account of the immense tract in Maine, purchased and held
by deeds, still on record at York, Me., by his grandfather, and in which
he, as the oldest grandson, born a few days after his grandfather's
death and named for him, might have been expected to be interested.

He was now twenty-seven. A large family of younger children had long
occupied his father's house. He sought a home of his own. His younger
brothers Elisha and Oliver were married and settled before him. He seems
to have inherited something of the ancestral enterprise of the Puritans,
"hankering for new land." All his brothers and sisters settled in
Connecticut, but he made his way in 1781 to Vermont. For a year
1781-1782, he worked at his trade in Bennington. During this time, he
purchased a farm in Addison, it is supposed of Ira Allen, a brother of
the redoubtable Ethan Allen; but the title proved, as so often happened,
with the early settlers to be defective. He recovered, many years
afterward, through the fidelity and skill of his lawyer, the Hon. Daniel
Chipman of Middlebury, the hard earned money which he had paid for the
farm at Chimney Point. It shows how thrifty he must have been, and how
resolute in his purpose to follow a pioneer life in Vermont, that after
this great loss he still had money, and a disposition to buy another
farm a