One morning when the fog lifted, Dickenson’s watch for danger was rewarded.  They had lost their way in the night; the fleet was gone, the dead blue slopes of water rolled up to the horizon on every side and were met by the dead blue sky, without the break of a single sail or the flicker of a flying bird.  For fifteen days they beat about without any apparent aim other than to escape the enemies whom they hourly expected to leap out from behind the sky-line.  On the sixteenth day friendly signs were made to them from shore.  “A fire made a great Smoak, and People beckoned to us to putt on Shoar,” but Kirle and Dickenson, seized with fresh fright, put about and made off as for their lives, until nine o’clock that night, when, seeing two signal-lights, doubtless from some of their own convoy, they cried out, “The French! the French!” and tacked back again as fast as might be.  The next day, Kirle being disabled by a jibbing boom, Dickenson brought his own terrors into command, and for two or three days whisked the unfortunate barkentine up and down the coast, afraid of both sea and shore, until finally, one night, he run her aground on a sand-bar on the Florida reefs.  Wondering much at this “judgment of God,” Dickenson went to work.  Indeed, to do him justice, he seems to have been always ready enough to use his burly strength and small wit, trusting to them to carry him through the world wherein his soul was beleaguered by many inscrutable judgments of God and the universal treachery of his brother-man.

The crew abandoned the ship in a heavy storm.  A fire was kindled in the bight of a sand-hill and protected as well as might be with sails and palmetto branches; and to this, Dickenson, with “Great trembling and Pain of Hartt,” carried his baby in his own arms and laid it in its mother’s breast.  Its little body was pitiful to see from leanness, and a great fever was upon it.  Robert Barrow, the crippled captain, and a sick passenger shared the child’s shelter.  “Whereupon two Canibals appeared, naked, but for a breech-cloth of plaited straw, with Countenances bloody and furious, and foaming at the Mouth”; but on being given tobacco, retreated inland to alarm the tribe.  The ship’s company gathered together and sat down to wait their return, expecting cruelty, says Dickenson, and dreadful death.  Christianity was now to be brought face to face with heathenness, which fact our author seems to have recognized under all his terror.  “We began by putting our trust in the Lord, hoping for no Mercy from these bloody-minded Creatures; having too few guns to use except to enrage them, a Motion arose among us to deceive them by calling ourselves Spaniards, that Nation having some influence over them”; to which lie all consented, except Robert Barrow.  It is curious to observe how these early Christians met the Indians with the same weapons of distrust and fraud which have proved so effective with us in civilizing them since.