22 Timehri. 



Then — horribile dictu ! — he finds himself in the Upper Bench 

 prison. Months passed, and nothing more was heard of the book. If 

 Ligon was unlettered, as he says he was, but which we, with all 

 due respect for so veracious a gentleman must refuse to believe, it is 

 probable that the delay was not without its advantages ; it may be partly 

 responsible for the " self-pleasing quaintness of many of his pages, 

 breathing the old time deliberation ! Some months before, the traveller 

 had been designing " a piece of Landscape, and one of Story, wherein I 

 meant to expresse the postures of the Negres. in their severall kinds of 

 Sports and Labours ; and with it. the beauties of the Vegetables that do 

 adorn that place." But now. being cast into Prison, he was deprived 

 • both of light and loneliness, two main helpers in that Art." So the idea 

 had to be abandoned. 



But he was not to be baulked of his book nevertheless. Writing 

 from Prison on July 12. 1653, this earlier John Bunyan, but of a some- 

 what dissimilar type, addresses an " Epistle Dedicatory " to the Bishop of 

 Salisbury. He has put his pages together, he says, and here they are. 

 The question is, shall he yet publish ? On September 5, the Bishop 

 replies in an affectionate letter, printed after the Dedication. ". And for 

 the question you put to me. whether you should publish it or not, I 

 desire you would make no doubt of it." By your aid, he adds, " I have 

 in a few daies gone the same voyage, view'd the Hand, weigh'd all the 

 Commodities and Incommodities of it, and all this with so much pleasure 

 that I cannot forbear telling you that though I have read formerly many 

 Relations of other parts of the World. I never yet met with so exact a 

 piece, as this of yours.'' 



Four years again elapse. Then in 1657, the True & Exact History 

 of the Island of Barbados is published in St. Paul's Churchyard. 



In 1673 a second edition appeared : Printed and sold by Peter 

 Parker, at His Shop at the Leg and Star over against the Royal Exchange, 

 and Thomas Guy at the corner Shop of Little Lumbard-street and 

 Cornhill. Beyond the correction of printers' errors, the second edition 

 differs not at all from the first. In 1(>74. the History was published in 

 Paris, — •• Histore de lisle des Barbados " — along with other African and 

 American Voyages. 



Ligon's book must have been read by many with great interest. It 

 was the first book published about Barbados. And Barbados, by the 



middle of the seventeenth century, was a place of some note, not to say 

 notoriety. Already it had defied the Parliament Fleet, and had been 

 granted its own Charter. For Royalists it was a Cave of Adullam, and 

 a jumping-ofi ground for Virginia, Jamaica and Antigua. Beating their 

 swords into ploughshares, broken soldiers from Marston Moor here 

 turned from the Field of Battle into the Tobacco Field. And lastly was it 

 not of this Island of which it had been said, ; 'the prisoners in the Tower 

 would be Barbadozz'd " ? 



