credit of the driver; so that the honest
fellow entertained us for some time with a variety of tunes, without
putting his mouth to the horn--The King of Prussia's March--Over the
Hill and over the Dale--with many other favorite tunes; at length the
thawing entertainment concluded, as I shall this short account of my
Russian travels.

VII

I embarked at Portsmouth, in a first-rate English man-of-war, of one
hundred guns, and fourteen hundred men, for North America. Nothing worth
relating happened till we arrived within three hundred leagues of the
river Saint Lawrence when the ship struck with amazing force against (as
we supposed) a rock; however, upon heaving the lead, we could find no
bottom, even with three hundred fathom. What made this circumstance the
more wonderful, and indeed beyond all comprehension, was, that the
violence of the shock was such that we lost our rudder, broke our
bow-sprit in the middle, and split all our masts from top to bottom, two
of which went by the board; a poor fellow, who was aloft, furling the
main-sheet, was flung at least three leagues from the ship; but he
fortunately saved his life by laying hold of the tail of a large
sea-gull, who brought him back, and lodged him on the very spot from
whence he was thrown. Another proof of the violence of the shock was the
force with which the people between decks were driven against the floors
above them; my head particularly was pressed into my stomach, where it
continued some months before it recovered its natural situation. Whilst
we were all in a state of astonishment at the general and unaccountable
confusion in which we were involved, the whole was suddenly explained by
the appearance of a large whale, who had been basking, asleep, within
sixteen feet of the surface of the water. This animal was so much
displeased with the disturbance which our ship had given him, for in our
passage we had with our rudder scratched his nose, that he beat in all
the gallery and part of the quarter deck with his tail, and almost at
the same instant took the main-sheet anchor, which was suspended, as it
usually is, from the head, between his teeth, and ran away with the
ship, at least sixty leagues, at the rate of twelve leagues an hour,
when fortunately the cable broke, and we lost both the whale and the
anchor. However, upon our return to Europe, some months after, we found
the same whale within a few leagues of the same spot, floating dead upon
the